There has been much written about these photographs of crossdressers at Casa Susanna and the issues surrounding them – for example, privacy of the individuals; gender roles in culture; oppression, criminalisation and anti-cross-dressing laws; how they were mainly white and from a higher socio-economic background (1950s stereotypes of white, middle-class womanhood); and celebrity adulation – to name but a few. I will let you read the text below to find out more.
What I will say is that it is a delight to see these intimate snapshot photographs of humans being who they want to be without prejudice… “the healthy expression of fun and joy.”
“Most guests at Casa Susanna were married, and considered themselves heterosexual men who enjoyed cross-dressing, but many others later identified as transgender and lived out their lives as women, including Virginia Prince and Susanna herself.” (Wikipedia)
“Photography was essential to them,” said Michel Hurst. “Photography was proof that they existed.”
The photograph Large group in the living room with Louise Lawrence (1963, below) shows a large group of crossdressers in a New York apartment. Attached to the photograph is a note: “This is me” with an arrow pointing to a crossdresser in the photo.
I find it poignant that “This is me” possesses a double meaning: being both a photographic representation of the person and also how they would like to be seen as a crossdresser, a declamation of the freedom to express themselves in the light of day … without the fear of being arrested or institutionalised, losing their jobs and being ostracised by their families and communities.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Art Gallery of Ontario for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
For the first time, three photography collections of Casa Susanna will be brought together, including the one from Cindy Sherman, Betsy Wollheim, and the AGO, which acquired the albums previously owned by Swope and Hurst. The show delves deeper into the narratives and ideals of the community’s protagonists, illuminating their radical approach to femininity and the importance of photography in sustaining identity and ideology.
From the mid-1950s until 1969, Susanna Valenti and her wife, Marie, operated two resorts for masculine-to-feminine cross-dressers in upstate New York: the Chevalier d’Eon Bungalows and Casa Susanna. The resorts provided a safe haven for visitors to explore alternative forms of gender expression. Guests spent weekends revelling in the freedom to dress in women’s clothing and accessories – something they could not do in day-to-day life – talking, performing skits, sharing fashion and makeup tips, and photographing one another. The snapshots, taken by the participants themselves, are typically candid and full of camaraderie: groups of friends at parties, enjoying a summer afternoon, celebrating birthdays. But many also feature individuals playing different female roles, including the femme fatale and the matron, highlighting a keen awareness of image, appearance, and gender roles in the culture.
The quiet banality of these scenes belies the violence and ridicule the subjects might have faced in the world at large. At the time, laws in Canada and the U.S. criminalized queer life. In New York, for instance, if an individual wore fewer than three items of clothing of their supposed gender, they could be arrested on charges of “sexual deviancy.” For decades, anti-cross-dressing laws were a flexible tool used by police to enforce normative notions of gender. These laws have now been repealed, human rights laws have been passed, and trans visibility has increased dramatically in recent years.
Anonymous. “Casa Susanna,” on the Contact Photography Festival website, May 2016 [Online] Cited 10/03/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
“The resort itself is secluded, way off the highway. The guests are never introduced to each other by their real names. Each gives a first name (a girl’s name of course) and that’s all. Discretion is a “must”… But to make things really fool proof, the management of the Resort maintains most cordial and friendly relations with the town’s chief of Police. He protects us!! ~ Susanna Says,” May 1960
“To take TV pictures it isn’t always necessary to stand in front of the camera making believe we are some sort of Rita Hayworth or Elizabeth Taylor… we decided to register on film the healthy expression of fun and joy that pervades a TV gathering… candid camera style… unposed and unexpected…these show the TV as she really looks to others.”
Susanna Says, December 1965
“Through these wonderfully intimate shots-perhaps never intended to see the light of day outside the sanctum of the “house”-Susanna and her gorgeous friends styled era-specific fashion shows and dress-up Christmas and tea parties. As gloriously primped as these documentary snaps are, it is in the more private and intimate life at Casa Susanna, where the girls sweep the front porch, cook, knit, play Scrabble, relax at the nearby lake and, of course, dress for the occasion, that the stunning insight to a very private club becomes nothing less than brilliant and awe inspiring in its pre-glam, pre-drag-pose ordinariness and nascent preening and posturing in new identities. It is not glamour for the stage but for each other, like other women who dress up to spend time with friends, flaunting their own sense of style. There is an evident pleasure of being here, at Casa Susanna, that is a liberation, a simplification of the conflicts inherent in a double life.”
Michel Hurst and Robert Swope. “About The Casa Susanna Book,” on the Simon & Schuster website Nd [Online] Cited 16/03/2024
But there was just one catch: no openly homosexual men were allowed. Living and working at a time when both gender expression and sexuality were criminalized, Tornell and Valenti restricted admittance to self-professed heterosexual men and their wives. The presence of wives signified deference to patriarchal notions of heterosexual gender roles, simultaneously averting unfounded fears of the presence of queer desires that upended the status quo. …
“Virginia Prince was a polarising figure in the queer and trans communities because she stuck to very rigid ideas of crossdressing: that you were a straight man who sometimes liked to wear women’s clothing,” says Sophie Hackett. “Her whole project was to normalise it but not everyone wanted to adhere to those dictates or the Ladies Home Journal kind of femininity that she and Susanna advocated.”
Miss Rosen. “Inside case Susanna,” on the Blind Magazine website July 12, 2023 [Online] Cited 14/03/2024
CASA SUSANNA | Trailer | AMERICAN EXPERIENCE | PBS
In the 1950s and ’60s, an underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place to express their true selves and live for a few days as they had always dreamed – dressed as and living as women without fear of being incarcerated or institutionalised. Told through the memories of those who visited the house, CASA SUSANNA provides a moving look back at a secret world where the persecuted and frightened found freedom, acceptance and, often, the courage to live out of the shadows.
Casa Susanna: An Inside Look
York University Professor, Michael Gilbert, also known as Miqqi Alicia, is a life-long cross-dresser who spoke with us about Casa Susanna, a safe haven and resort for cross-dressers in upstate New York during the ’50s and ’60s.
Unknown photographer (American) Susanna in a shiny gown on the stage at the Chevalier d’Eon, Hunter, NY 1960-1963 Gelatin silver print 14 x 9cm Collection of Cindy Sherman
From the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, a network of crossdressers found refuge in the Catskills region of New York State. Susanna with her wife Marie created safe spaces at two modest resorts for guests to freely crossdress en femme at a time of strictly defined gender roles. Guests used photography to build their femme identities and their network. These snapshots – candid, playful, and at times staged, blending family and fashion photography conventions – have since come to be known collectively as the Casa Susanna photographs.
Casa Susanna brings together for the first time three collections of photographs created by this network of crossdressers: from the AGO’s holdings, from the personal collection of artist Cindy Sherman, and from the collection of Betsy Wollheim. Seen together, these 250 images, provide insight into this historically significant crossdressing scene, allowing us to develop an understanding of this world and its connection to the lives of trans and crossdressing people today. These affirming photographs circulated among crossdressers by mail, as well as in the pages of Transvestia, a community magazine, copies of which will also be on view
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated publication that brings together recent research, an expansive selection of photographs, and pages of Transvestia, adding another important account of the ways photographs have served to build queer communities. Co-published by Editions Textuel, it includes essays by co-curators French photo historian, Isabelle Bonnet and AGO Curator of Photography, Sophie Hackett, as well as noted American scholar of trans history Susan Stryker.
Casa Susanna is coproduced by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Rencontres D’Arles.
“If the photographs had been revealed 50 years prior, people like Susanna Valenti, Katherine Cummings and Diana Merry-Shapiro could have been arrested or institutionalized, lost their jobs and been ostracized by their families and communities. For more than a century, cross-dressing was criminalized in the United States through statutes like “masquerade laws,” which were used to persecute many forms of gender expression in public spaces under the guise of limiting prostitution and “immoral performances” – an echo of the drag-show bans currently being passed in Tennessee and other states. …
More recently, several states have introduced laws to limit or ban drag shows as part of a wider attack on LGBTQ+ rights around the country. Nearly 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been filed in state legislatures this year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is tracking legislation across the country. An Associated Press analysis showed lawmakers have been motivated to file these bills by a handful of conservative interest groups, not constituent demand.”
“Some of these snapshots are black and white, some in colour. The photographer was often either the subject herself (using a self-timer or cable release, both relatively new at the time) or a trusted member of the community (easily obtainable in group settings). Initially, many would develop the pictures themselves rather than risk involvement of an external lab. As the Polaroid instant camera became more affordable it revolutionized photography for this community, which was a critical tool for them to image / imagine themselves for their own use or for sharing with others in their society. …
Some pictures were taken at home, or in a hotel room, with the curtains carefully drawn, to ensure privacy and create a little world where freedom was momentarily possible. They are typically deliberately posed, with a definite sense of happiness and an aura of breaking a constricting taboo. Other photographs were shot at one of the resorts, often outdoors. The joy here is quite evident, with a strong quality of relief. The pictures taken later on seem to become less performative, and show people simply being.
In constructing their female appearance and persona, the subjects here (who were almost all white) leaned heavily on 1950s stereotypes of white, middle-class womanhood. There would seem to be an irony in that they thereby leveraged a patriarchy that oppressed them. However, from my perspective, their goal (which I instinctively understand) was to externalize an inner truth in a way that was meaningful to them, that could be seen by select others, and by themselves in a mirror or in their photographs; and in this they were successful.
One display was a case containing a distinctive snapshot and a short biography for each of 18 different individuals who appear in the pictures. These are poignant reminders of the humanity of this community and the serious challenges that they faced. And it provided positive proof that my intuition from 2014 was correct, my personal sisterhood was indeed there. First, I hasten to stress that even without physical transition one can still be a woman, it is an internal identification; however, when someone assigned male at birth followed that path (especially during that era) it is very suggestive of a female gender. With that in mind, it was personally moving to find that one of the 18, whose name was Gloria, and who happened to be a millionaire, used her fortune to support women seeking (pioneering at that time) gender affirmation surgery in Mexico, before, during and afterwards; and that two others, Kate and Irène, successfully underwent the procedure.”
Jennifer Wenn is a trans-identified writer from London, Ontario, Canada.
Jennifer Wenn. “Casa Susanna, at the Art Gallery of Ontario,” on the Centred.ca website January 4, 2024 [Online] Cited 05/03/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Of particular note is the gathering of 71 transvestites at the Chevalier D’Eon Resort for Halloween 1962, held a day after the New York police unusually raided the annual National Variety Artists costume ball and 30 cross-dressed “men” were arrested. The guests at Chevalier D’Eon Resort included Virginia Prince, Katherine Cummings, Felicity Chandelle, Darrell Raynor and Gail Wilde, and psychologists Hugo Beigel and Wardell Pomeroy. Raynor, Cummings and Beigel later wrote about the event.
Both Virginia and Susanna were upset by one guest who not only did not bother to shave, he also smoked a cigar. This brought Susanna closer to Virginia’s point of view that a cultivation of ‘inner femininity’ distinguished true transvestites from drag queens and fetishists. She expressed this opinion in her column several times. Initially ‘fetishism’ had been equated with partial dressing, but FPE increasingly identified as fetishistic those who fully dressed as female but failed or didn’t bother to fashion themselves as truly feminine. A few years later Sheila Niles would propose the term ‘whole girl fetishist’.
This winter, the Art Gallery of Ontario and Rencontres D’Arles present Casa Susanna, an exhibition of snapshots taken by members of the earliest known American crossdressing network, which operated in upstate New York from the mid-1950s through the end of the 1960s. Co-curated by Sophie Hackett, the AGO’s curator of photography and Dr. Isabelle Bonnet, a photography historian and independent curator, this is the first museum exhibition dedicated to what are collectively known as the Casa Susanna photographs and features previously unseen images.
“These joyful snapshots provide insight into a historically significant crossdressing scene, allowing us to develop an understanding of this world and its connection to the lives of trans and crossdressing people today,” says Sophie Hackett, AGO Curator of Photography. “Looking at these snapshots, I am not only touched by their familial atmosphere and conviviality, but also reminded of the ways photography has been – and continues to be – used as a powerful tool for affirming personal identity and forging community.”
“At a time when trans people – and more broadly, 2SLGBTQ+ people – are attacked from many sides, I think that this exhibition and this book serve a public purpose: the story of the members of Casa Susanna, which is that of thousands of people across the world throughout the centuries, call for respect and tolerance,” says Dr. Isabelle Bonnet. “The personalities that gradually emerged during my research, notably those of Gloria, Kate, Vicky, Felicity, Gail, Susanna and Marie, filled me with admiration and I hope to pass it on to those who come to see the exhibition.”
Bringing together three collections of amateur photographs for the first time – from the AGO’s holdings, from the personal collection of artist Cindy Sherman, and from the collection of Betsy Wollheim, the exhibition tells the story of a community of men, including Wollheim’s own father, who regularly met at two upstate New York retreats organized by Susanna Valenti and her wife Marie, where they were free to safely dress as women and express their feminine identities. Organised thematically, the exhibition shines a spotlight on many of the community’s leading figures and describes how and where they came gathered and the feminine ideals they celebrated.
Snapshots of and by the community – all White, upper middle-class professionals – reveal days spent dressing up, swimming, playing cards, and generally enjoying life as women. The photographs bring to light the type of femininity they aspired to, drawn from images in their visual culture, for instance widely seen in magazines like Ladies Home Journal: traditional and appropriate, even as the crossdressers defied the strict gender prescriptions of their time. The exhibition includes copies of Transvestia magazine, a clandestine publication founded by Virginia Prince in 1960 that provided a vital forum for connection, information, and images to crossdressers across the United States and beyond. It also highlights the radical nature of this community, and the role photographs played in affirming and sustaining trans identities.
A leader in the presentation and research of vernacular photography, the AGO has acquired numerous collections showcasing historically underrepresented photographers, makers, and subjects, among them the Casa Susanna Collection. First discovered at the 26th Street flea market in New York City by furniture dealers Michel Hurst and Robert Swope in 2004, the AGO’s collection of 340 Casa Susanna photographs – acquired in 2015 – originally belonged to Susanna Valenti.
Accompanying the exhibition is a 480-page illustrated publication, edited by co-curators Sophie Hackett and Isabelle Bonnet. Bringing together recent research, an expansive selection of photographs, and pages of Transvestia, Casa Susanna was shortlisted for the Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards 2023. Published by Editions Textuel in both English and French, Casa Susanna is available at shopAGO for $73.
Isabelle Bonnet, Sophie Hackett Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968
Thames and Hudson Ltd, January 2024
480 pp softback
[This book] Brings together a wealth of research and an expansive selection of photographs to create an enduring account of America’s first known trans network, Casa Susanna.
In the 1950s and 60s, an underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place to express their true selves and live for a few days as they had always dreamed – dressed as and living as women without fear of being incarcerated or institutionalised for their self-expression.
This book opens up that now-lost world. The photographs – mostly discovered by chance in a New York flea market in 2004 – chronicle the experiences of men who dressed as women, gender nonconforming people, and trans women in states of relaxation, experimentation, connection and joy. All of this was made possible by Susanna Valenti who – on her own journey toward womanhood – created Casa Susanna, a protected space where others could crossdress and live freely as women. Supplementing the images are excerpts from Transvestia, a magazine that allowed those who had been cast out by a rigidly binary society to connect in a different medium.
The people who came to Casa Susanna found a spot where they could explore and celebrate their own and each other’s femininity, as they could not do elsewhere. Their creations are also a reminder that there were, and still are, many ways to explore the boundaries of gender.
Isabelle Bonnet is an independent curator, currently completing a thesis in history / visual culture devoted to the crime scene in contemporary photography. Sophie Hackett is the Curator, Photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Susan Stryker is professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona.
from the series Travelling the wonderful loneliness 2019-2024
March 2024
My mother’s apples
During 2019 I took a photographic journey through Europe. The trip was an ascetic experience, hardly talking to anyone for 2 months, immersed in photography, taking almost 10,000 photographs on three digital cameras. I have whittled these photographs down to around 120 images in four sequences.
This sequence, (How I) Wish You Were Here, is one of the four sequences in the series collectively titled Travelling the wonderful loneliness (2019-2024).
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
EL 25
Looking at you looking at me
Crossing
Habitat
Dawn, Prague
Only You
Photoautomat
Imaginary friends
Ascending
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
Infinity, Centre Pompidou
Mr Skull is Not for sale!
Golden angel
Pastoral landscape, No. 2
Purple chair
Blue jeans
White coach
Love
V&A Photography Centre, London
Dawn, Prague
The Bell
An American in Amsterdam (Berenice Abbott)
C D
Arriving leaving, Stowmarket
Pink, blue, green
Ovule
Heads I win tails you loose
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ print costs $1,000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see the Store web page.
Curator: Susan van Wyk, NGV Senior Curator of Photography
Paul Strand (American 1890-1976, France 1951-1976) Still life, pear and bowls, Twin Lakes, Connecticut 1916, printed 1983 From the Paul Strand: The Formative Years 1914-1917 portfolio photogravure National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1984 Public domain
“I feel that photographs can either document or record reality or they can offer images as an alternative to everyday life: places for the viewer to dream in.”
Francesca Woodman, 1980
Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors…
In many ways the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia can be seen as a summation of all that is good and bad with the photography collection and the photography exhibition program at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Since the sad and unfortunate demise of the small but important dedicated photography gallery, photography exhibitions at the NGV (other than the large Patrick Pound exhibition all those years ago in 2017) have been in a state of deep freeze. I MISS that little third floor gallery… it’s all we had for photography at the NGV on a regular basis and there were some interesting shows there. It’s been gone for years and photography has been lumped in with contemporary art. And then, and now, nothing for years.
Therefore, as a fellow photographic artist observed to me, “It was great to see the NGV finally give photography a large exhibition after so many years of neglect.” Never a truer word said.
Let’s get the good stuff about the exhibition out of the way first. Whoever curated the exhibition (unknown, unnamed) really knew how to pull an installation of photographs together. There was some sophisticated sequencing of the images on the various themes from Australian and International artists, very intelligently and beautifully rendered which I enjoyed tremendously. I also enjoyed seeing the glorious display of photobooks: I was in heaven seeing in one display cabinet Man Ray’s book Photographs by Man Ray Paris 1920-1934 (published 1934), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s book Aveux non Avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) (published 1930), Bill Brandt’s book Perspective of Nudes (published 1961), and Germaine Krull’s book Nude studies (Études de nu) (published 1930). What a selection!
And it was finally great to see Australian and international work displayed together on such a large scale, something I can’t remember happening in the 35 years I have being viewing photography exhibitions in Australia. This is something that the NGV should have been promoting for many years, the placement of Australian photography in an international context… even taking this concept overseas, to promote Australian photography internationally. But no, nothing of this kind of forward thinking has ever happened in insular Australia.
Now to the not so good stuff. The most glaring anomaly about the exhibition was its over ambitious structure. While the concept ‘Real & Imagined’ was very strong – an exhibition of photographs picturing a version of reality captured by the camera (for it can never capture reality itself) / photographs created by the imagination of human beings – this robust concept was overwhelmed by too many thematic sections in the exhibition.
These sections included ‘Light’ and ‘Systems and Surface’ and ‘Surreal’ and ‘Narrative’ and ‘Work and Play’ and ‘Movement’ and ‘Studio and Things’ and ‘Display’ and ‘Consumption’ and ‘Self’ and ‘Skin’ and ‘Community and Touch’ and ‘Environment’ and ‘Place and Built’ and ‘Nineteenth-century photography’ and ‘Conflict’ and ‘Death’. I’m exhausted already…
And then, walking around the exhibition, the wall texts used to identify and illuminate these sections became totally irrelevant as through their placement on the wall I had no idea to which area they were referring. It was totally confusing and in the end I just ignored them.
As I observed people wandering around the exhibition, most had no idea of the importance of some of the images on display… why would they? They are not photography aficionados but the viewing public. If I found the exhibition confusing imagine how they viewed it. What the NGV should have done was have a guided tour on the hour, every hour, to talk about the seminal works in the exhibition and about how the exhibition had been structured. Imagine someone explaining the importance of the four photobooks in a display cabinet mentioned earlier in the history of photography and how by putting them together you were creating a sophisticated dialogue over time about identity and gender issues.
As the aforementioned colleague observed to me, “the exhibition felt like a data dump with a tacked on theme that strained (and failed) to resonate.” I wouldn’t go that far for the overall concept was strong and vibrant but like much of what has happened with the photography collection at the NGV, the overall outcome was confused and piecemeal.
This can no better be illustrated than through the comments of the Director of the NGV, Tony Ellwood, when he said in the press release, “This exhibition celebrates the collections and achievements of the NGV’s photography department, which has presented more than 180 exhibitions in its 55-year history. The exhibition is a testament to the strength of the NGV Collection, with so many key examples of the history of photography represented, from the earliest examples from the 19th century, through to contemporary images being produced right now in the twenty-first century.”
I note that when the head of the NGV boasts about the number of photography exhibitions over the last 55 years (180, about 3 a year mainly small exhibitions) and the “strength” of the NGV Photography Collection… you know that he is proselytising.
Most of the large photography exhibitions have been brought in from outside sources in the last 30 years and little research has been done into Australian photography and its relationship to world photography in house. And while the NGV collection has “strength” in certain areas it is woefully lacking in others. Again, the word “piecemeal” springs to mind, like Swiss cheese full of the biggest holes … and this exhibition only serves to reinforce that idea, often displaying the only photograph by an important artist that the collection holds.
Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors!
For example I picked a few photographic artists off the top of my head as I thought of them – and the NGV collection possesses some in reasonable depth:
Edward Steichen 23
Paul Strand 51
Brassai 17
André Kertesz 45
Eugène Atget 143
Frank Hurley 20
Max Dupain 94
Bill Brandt 44
Bill Henson 108
Lee Friedlander 31
David Goldblatt 15
Dorothea Lange 28
August Sander 16
Other important photographers the NGV have nothing or next to nothing at all:
Joseph Sudek 1
Stephen Shore 0
William Eggleston 0
Julia Margaret Cameron 3
Robert Mapplethorpe 1
Ansel Adams 4
Hiroshi Sugimoto 1
Daido Moriyama 0
Raja Deen Dayal 0
Aleksandr Rodchenko 1
Olive Cotton 9
Berenice Abbott 7
Diane Arbus 2
Roger Ballen 1
Bernd and Hiller Becher 1
Thomas Ruff 2
Manuel Álvarez Bravo 0
Edward Weston 6
Henri Cartier-Bresson 2
Robert Frank 11
Garry Winogrand 0
Nan Goldin 3
Gordon Parks 3
Lewis Hine 9
Peter Hujar 0
Imogen Cunningham 6
Not exactly an institution that has “strength” in their photography collection. And over the last 30 years seemingly nothing much has been done to plug these enormous holes in the collection…. instead, for example, buying one work by Jeff Wall for a million dollars.
The NGV needs to improve the photography collection and its photography exhibition program. After too many years of stagnation an injection of new ideas and a new direction for exhibition programming is needed. A couple of focused photography exhibitions per year would be a good start, as would the purchasing of historic photographs to fill huge gaps in the collection rather than the purchasing of contemporary work. Non-vintage prints of the masters can still be bought at affordable prices. And therein lies just one of the problems: money.
Investment in photography at the NGV in terms of people and money is much needed, otherwise the deep freeze and dance of smoke and mirrors will continue well into the future.
Photography: Real and Imagined examines two perspectives on photography; photography grounded in the real world, as a record, a document, a reflection of the world around us; and photography as the product of imagination, storytelling and illusion. On occasion, photography operates in both realms of the real and the imagined.
Highlighting major photographic works from the NGV Collection, including recent acquisitions on display for the very first time, Photography: Real and Imagined examines the complex, engaging and sometimes contradictory nature, of all things photographic. The NGV’s largest survey of the photography collection, the exhibition includes more than 300 works by Australian and international photographers and artists working with photo-media from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at rear left, Penelope Davis’ Shelf (2008) and Non-fiction (red) (2008, below); at third right, Anne Ferran’s Scenes on the death of nature, III (1986); at second right, Candida Höfer’s Teylers Museum Haarlem II (2003, below); and at right, Thomas Struth’s Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (2001) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Penelope Davis’ Shelf (2008) and Non-fiction (red) (2008) from the Fiction-Non-Fiction series 2007-2008 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at middle left, Anne Ferran’s Scenes on the death of nature, III (1986); at centre, Candida Höfer’s Teylers Museum Haarlem II (2003, below); and at middle right, Thomas Struth’s Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (2001) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The luminous photograph by Thomas Struth shows museum visitors immersed in observing the Telephos frieze within a room of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Struth draws our attention to the fact that viewing a work of art in a public gallery is rarely a private experience. The visit is usually shared by other visitors, museum staff, security guards and tour guides. There is also the omnipresent gaze of security cameras. Struth seems to be emulating the technical innovations of the Telephos frieze in his arrangement of the viewers. Similarities between the poses of the audience members and the poses of the carved relief figures gradually emerge, suggesting an unconscious dialogue between the viewers and the objects they regard.
Wall text from the exhibition
Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944) Teylers Museum Haarlem II 2003 Type C photograph National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 2004
This photograph shows the famous Oval Room within Teylers Museum, the oldest public museum in the Netherlands. Candida Höfer photographed the space bathed in a brilliant, even light that illuminates its architecture, objects and famed mineralogical cabinet. The highly structured museological ordering of the objects and the Neoclassical architecture that contains them are exaggerated by the formal, symmetrical composition of the photograph. This image invites reflection of the ways in which cultural institutions direct our engagement with materials. As the artist has said, ‘There are no people there, but you understand that the places were made specially for them. This is very meaningful for me, and it’s exactly what I want to express’.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Anne Ferran’s Scenes on the death of nature, III (1986); at centre, Candida Höfer’s Teylers Museum Haarlem II (2003, above); and at right, Thomas Struth’s Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (2001). In the distance can be seen Lotte Jacobi’s Head of a dancer (1929, below); Man Ray’s Head of a dancer (1929, below); and Lee Miller’s Nimet Eloui Bey (c. 1930, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lotte Jacobi (German 1896-1990, United States 1935-1990) Head of a dancer 1929, printed c. 1970 Gelatin silver photograph 26.4 x 33.2cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021 Public domain
Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976) Kiki with African mask 1926 Gelatin silver photograph 21.1 x 27.6cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of Miss Flora MacDonald Anderson and Mrs Ethel Elizabeth Ogilvy Lumsden, Founder Benefactors, 1983 Public domain
Kiki with African maskis one of Man Ray’s most celebrated photographs and an iconic image of the Art Deco period. First published in Vogue in 1926, it is an elegant image, but it also speaks to the impact of European colonialism in Africa. In this pared-back studio photograph all extraneous detail is excluded from the image, focusing our attention on the exquisitely made-up face of Kiki in juxtaposition with the perfectly polished ebony of the mask. This photograph invites us to delight in the physical beauty of Man Ray’s celebrated model but offers nothing about the mask or its maker.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Lee Miller’s Nimet Eloui Bey (c. 1930, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lee Miller (American 1907-1977) Nimet Eloui Bey (installation view) c. 1930 Gelatin silver photograph 23.0 x 15.8cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lee Miller may have been well-known as Man Ray’s colleague, model and lover, but she was also celebrated for her own photographic practice, producing portrait and fashion photographs. When Miller photographed Egyptian model Nimet Eloui Bey the encounter changed both women’s lives. Four years after taking this intimate portrait, Miller would marry Nimet’s then husband, Aziz Eloui Bey. As curator Sophia Cai comments, ‘The personal scandal behind this portrait colours many contemporary interpretations, but also demonstrates the way that the personal lives of artists become interwoven with their artistic identities. This is particularly true in instances of women artists who are relegated to the role of the “muse” or lovers to male artists’.
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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at centre, Fiona Pardington’s Portrait of a life-cast of Koe, Timor (2010) and Portrait of a life cast of Matoua Tawai, Aotearoa New Zealand (2010); and at right, Linda Judge’s Victoria and Albert Museum 20/4/94 (1994, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Fiona Pardington’s photograph shows a life cast of the tattooed head of a Māori man, Matoua Tawai. The cast, held in a museum collection, is one of many made by Pierre- Marie Alexandre Dumoutier of Māori peoples in the 1830s. Pardington, who is of Māori and Scottish descent, has spoken of her desire to reconsider the complex history of these life casts and find a state of continuum between the past and present, to, as she says, ‘find the faces of the living people presenting and manifesting in the object’. Printing the photograph at larger-than-life scale provokes a physical encounter, an opportunity to look again and reconsider the histories of the person, the object and the image.
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Linda Judge (Australian, b. 1964) Victoria and Albert Museum 20/4/94 (installation view detail) 1994 Type C photographs National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Margaret Stewart Endowment, 1994 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In this image, Linda Judge wittily creates new narratives and resurrects otherwise ‘mummified’ museum objects. Concerned with the open-ended nature of archives and their ability to slip between fiction and reality, Judge presents photographs of historical lace from the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Beneath each photograph, Judge has provided a range of both ‘plausible’ captions (’12. collar, cuff, border: Italian, late 17th century, Tape lace with needlepoint fillings and brides’) and fanciful ones (’51. veil: Brussels, end 18th century, needlepoint on bobbin ground. Worn by Madonna, for Like a Virgin in her Brussels tour ’91’). Judge humorously invites the viewer to interrogate the expectations of truth in the presentation of archival content.
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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Martin Parr’s Pink pig cakes from Common Sense (1995-1999); at fourth left, ringl+pit’s Komol (1931, below); at fifth left, Ilse Bing’s Salut de Schiaparelli (1934, below); and at sixth left, Dora Maar’s Untitled (Study of Beauty) (1936, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing ringl+pit’s Komol (1931, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Martin Parr’s Pink Pig Cakes, Bristol, UK (1995); at third right, Lillian Bassman’s More fashion mileage per dress, Barbara Vaughn, Harper’s Bazaar, New York (1956); at second right, and at right, Darren Sylvester’s On Holiday (2010) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Darren Sylvester builds and photographs hyperreal tableaux using the visual language of advertising – beautiful models, perfect lighting and considered ‘product’ placement – to construct a familiar yet illusionary reality. Here Sylvester’s model plays the role of a handsome businessman. ‘Against a sunrise, a business traveller gazes at an unknown destination’, Sylvester once wrote of this image. ‘The composition plays on stereotypes of luxury aspirations and aeroplane advertisements. For example, no-one ever flies into darkness or storms in an ad.’ In this lush, seductive photograph, Sylvester explores the slippery space between reality and illusion, aspiration and irrelevance, as we move on to the next shiny thing.
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Lillian Bassman (American, 1917-2012) More fashion mileage per dress, Barbara Vaughn, Harper’s Bazaar, New York 1956, printed later Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023
In the late 1930s, Lillian Bassman studied fashion illustration and textile design at the Pratt Institute, New York. In 1940 she began working with Alexey Brodovitch, art director of Harper’s Bazaar magazine, which soon led to her appointment as art director of the subsidiary publication Junior Bazaar. In this capacity she worked with photographers, including Richard Avedon and Robert Frank, and in 1947 began working as a freelance fashion and advertising photographer. In an interview later in her life Bassman played down her directorial role as photographer, stating, ‘It is part of the nature of a woman to be unconsciously graceful … I try to record that natural grace with a camera’.
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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Athol Shmith’s Fashion illustration, model Ann Chapman (c. 1961) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Alice Mills’ Joan Margaret Syme (c. 1918, below); at second left, works by Edson Chagas from his Tipo Passe series (2014); and at third left, Hassan Hajjaj’s Master Cobra Mansa (2013, below) with at right, Martin Parr’s Pink Pig Cakes, Bristol, UK (1995) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Alice Mills (attributed to) (Australian, 1870-1929) Joan Margaret Syme c. 1918 Gelatin silver photograph, coloured dyes National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented through the NGV Foundation by Michael Hayne, 2005 Public domain
Alice Mills set up her first studio in Melbourne in 1900. She was highly regarded as a portrait photographer and in 1907 was invited to exhibit in the Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work. Her portrait of five-year-old Joan Margaret Syme dressed in a leopard-skin robe is an outstanding example of studio portraiture. It shows the skilled application of hand colouring, which was used to transform black-and-white photographs in the era before colour photography, bringing a life-like quality to the portrait. At almost two metres high, this is no only a charming study of a young child, but one of the largest photographs from the early twentieth century in the NGV Collection.
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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left Alice Mills’ Joan Margaret Syme (c. 1918, above); at centre, works by Edson Chagas from his Tipo Passe series (2014); and at right, Hassan Hajjaj’s Master Cobra Mansa (2013, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Multidisciplinary artist Hassan Hajjaj’s portraits show London’s Moroccan diaspora; as a designer he also creates stylish street fashion and playful interiors that are a contemporary take on Moroccan tea houses and riads. Hajjaj came to professional photography by happenstance, taking pictures both for fun and as a tool while working as a stylist on music videos. It soon became a cornerstone of his creative practice. From the outset Hajjaj wanted his photography to show ‘another side of Moroccan culture’, something that, as he says, was not ‘camels, dates and drinking mint tea!’
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Adolphe Braun (French 1811-1877) No title (Flower study) c. 1854 Albumen silver photograph 31.0 x 37.3cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased NGV Foundation, 2017 Public domain
Adolphe Braun arrived in Paris in 1828 to study drafting and decorative design and within six years had established a textile design studio. Around 1853 he began to make photographs using the recently invented collodion process. The following year Braun commenced a project to photograph an extensive series of flower studies with the intent of providing documentary source material for artists and designers. He produced 300 of these photographs and in 1854 published his images in a six-volume series titled Fleurs photographiés. When they were exhibited in the 1855 Universal Exhibition in Paris, Braun was awarded a gold medal for his work’s usefulness to the fabric and decorating industries.
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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left Julie Rrap’s Persona and shadow: Madonna (1984, below)
Julie Rrap (Australian, b. 1950) Persona and shadow: Madonna 1984 Cibachrome photograph 194.7 × 104.6cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Michell Endowment, 1984
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, Yasumasa Morimura’s An inner dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Flower wreath and tears) (2001, below); Phumzile Khanyile’s Untitled (2016); Zanele Muholi’s Ntozkhe II (Parktown) (2016, below); Ayana V. Jackson’s How sweet the song (2017); Julie Rrap’s Madonna (1984, above); and Siri Hayes Spilling pearls (2012) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Yasumasa Morimura (Japanese, b. 1951) An inner dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Flower wreath and tears) (installation views) 2001 From the An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo series 1991-2001 Photograph, plastic 213.4cm diameter National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased NGV Foundation, 2022 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Using found props – in this instance a ‘crown’ of scouring pads – Zanele Muholi has photographed themself to confront racial stereotypes and examine concepts of self-representation while honouring generations of women who have worked domestically. Discussing this work the artist wrote, ‘In some ways, yes: Ntozakhe is based on the Statue of Liberty, representing the idea of freedom – the freedom all women should have – as well as pride: pride in who we are as black, female-bodied beings. But what kind of freedom are we talking about? What is the colour of the Statue of Liberty? What race is the figure monumentalised as Lady Liberty?’
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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Julie Rrap’s Madonna (1984, above); at second left, Siri Hayes’ Spilling pearls (2012); at third left, Sarah Lucas’ Self-portrait with fried eggs (1999); at fourth left, William Yang’s William, Father, Mother, Graceville, Brisbane (1974, below) and then his Self Portrait #5 (2008, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Yang (Australian, b. 1943) William, Father, Mother, Graceville, Brisbane (installation view) 1974, printed 2014 Inkjet print National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2014 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Yang’s autobiographical photographs combine photographs and handwritten text to tell the stories of Yang’s family, his childhood, and his experiences of being Chinese in an Australia that was not always welcoming to him. In one of these photographs Yang points to the difficulties he faced as a young man torn between his parents’ aspirations for him and his own wish for a different life. In the other, he describes himself as more content, at ease with himself and the choices he has made in his life. Together they form part of a powerful account of his life and sense of self.
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William Yang (Australian, b. 1943) Self Portrait #5 (installation view) 2008; printed 2014 From the Self Portrait series Inkjet print 43 x 65cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2014 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, Virginie Grange’s Untitled (1990); George Hoyningen-Huene’s Horst torso (1931, below); František Drtikol’s Nude (1927-1929); Olive Cotton’s Max after surfing (1937, below); Edward Weston’s Nude (1936, below); Eadweard Muybridge’s Plate 227 from Animal Locomotion series 1887; and Helmut Newton’s Big nude I (1980) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, George Hoyningen-Huene’s Horst torso (1931, below); František Drtikol’s Nude (1927-1929); Olive Cotton’s Max after surfing (1937, below); Edward Weston’s Nude (1936, below); Eadweard Muybridge’s Plate 227 from Animal Locomotion series 1887 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The František Drtikol was the first fine art photograph to enter the National Gallery of Victoria collection.
George Hoyningen-Huene (Russian 1900-1968, England 1917-1921, France 1921-1935, United States 1935-1968) Horst torso 1931, printed 1980s Gelatin silver photograph 23.1 x 27.9cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2017
Edward Weston (American 1886-1958) Nude 1936, printed 1976 Gelatin silver photograph 17.8 x 23.8cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased from Agfa and B. H. P. donation, 1977 Public domain
Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003) Max after surfing 1937, printed 1998 Gelatin silver photograph 26.0 x 19.7cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of Optus Communications Pty Limited, Member, 1998
Photographs of lovers, family and friends are perhaps the most emotionally charged of all images, not because the subject is monumental or dramatic, but because they allow us to see into intimate relationships. When photographs show subjects nude, or even partially naked, the sense of familiarity is heightened. Olive Cotton’s photograph of Max Dupain is an image that reveals intimacy and tenderness. His body is sculpted by raking side lighting and the allusion to Classical sculpture is apparent, but this photograph also carries an erotic charge – Dupain is shown as being tanned and muscular, movie-star handsome and the object of Cotton’s desire.
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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, Francesca Woodman’s Space², Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 (1976, below); E. J. Bellocq’s Woman reclining with mask (c. 1912, below); Florence Henri’s Nude composition (c. 1930, below); an anonymous American photographer’s image Kaloma (1914); and Germaine Krull’s Daretha (Dorothea) Albu (c. 1925) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981) Space², Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 1976, printed c. 2000 Gelatin silver photograph 16.3 x 16.3cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Ruth Margaret Frances Houghton Bequest, 2021
Francesca Woodman once stated, ‘I want my pictures to have a certain timeless, personal but allegorical quality like they do in many Ingres history paintings, but I like the rough edge that photography gives a nude’. Woodman was only twenty-three when she died, her work has had a profound impact on other artists, including Cindy Sherman, who wrote, ‘[Woodman] had few boundaries and made art out of nothing: empty rooms with peeling wallpaper and just her figure … Her process struck me more the way a painter works, making do with what’s right in front of her, rather than photographers like myself who need time to plan out what they’re going to do’.
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E. J. Bellocq (American, 1873-1949) No title (Woman reclining with mask) c. 1912, printed c. 1981 From the Storyville Portraits series c. 1911-1913 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1981 Public domain
Florence Henri (American, 1893-1982) Nude composition (Nu composition) c. 1930 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2021 Public domain
This photograph is a beautiful example of the way in which Florence Henri combined the elements of New Objectivity in photography, including sharp focus and unexpected vantage points, with her exploration of identity and sexuality. The presentation of the woman is unashamedly erotic: her naked form is presented for the pleasure of the viewer, but she does not conform to conventional modes of softcore pornography. The woman’s gaze excludes the viewer; she reclines on a coarse cloth backdrop, crumpled to suggest a beach as she looks at a perfect conch shell symbolising female fertility and an eloquently beautiful indicator of the artist’s object of desire.
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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Sophie Calle’s The giraffe (2012); and centre right, Lynne Roberts-Goodwin’s Al Hammadi Desert Saqar #1 and #3; and at right, Sarah Waiswa’s Finding solace (2016) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Sarah Waiswa (Ugandan, b. 1980) Finding solace (installation view) 2016 From the Stranger in a Familiar Land series 2016 Inkjet print 79.5 × 79.5cm Purchased NGV Foundation, 2017 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Sarah Waiswa has described her series Stranger in a Familiar Land as an exploration of life outside the security and boundaries of community. Discussing her work, she wrote, ‘People fear what they do not understand … The concept of Stranger in a Familiar Land groups together various portraits of an albino woman set against the backdrop of the Kibera slums, which are a metaphor for my turbulent vision of the outside world. The series also explores how the sense of non-belonging has led her to wander and exist in a dreamlike state. People notice Kisombe, but at the same time, they don’t’.
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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at right, Lynne Roberts-Goodwin’s Al Hammadi Desert Saqar #1 and #3 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, Jan Groover’s Untitled (1981); August Sander’s Bohemians (Willi Bongard and Gottfried Brockman) (1922-1925, below); Julia Margaret Cameron’s Mrs Herbert Duckworth, her son George, Florence Fisher and H. A. L. Fisher (c. 1871, below); Harry Callahan’s Eleanor and Barbara, Chicago (1954); Gordon Parks’ Big Mama and boy, 1961 (1961); Micky Allan’s Man holding his daughter (1982, below); Brenda L. Croft’s In my mother’s garden (1998); and Angela Lynkushka’s Zühre Yildirim from Turkey with grand-daughter Nurahan Gundogdu, born in Australia. De Carle Street, Brunswick (1982) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
August Sander (German, 1876-1964) Bohemians (Willi Bongard and Gottfried Brockman) 1922-1925, printed 1973 From the People of the Twentieth Century project 1920s-1964 Gelatin silver photograph 23.3 x 30.5cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1974
Gottfried Waldemar Brockmann (1903-1983) was a German artist, educator, publisher, and served as a cultural advisor for the city of Kiel, Germany. He taught at Muthesius Academy of Art in Kiel.
Julia Margaret Cameron (English, 1815-1879, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) 1875-1879) Mrs Herbert Duckworth, her son George, Florence Fisher and H. A. L. Fisher c. 1871 Albumen silver photograph 31.0 x 22.7cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 1979 Public domain
In this portrait, Julia Duckworth sits for her aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the nineteenth century’s most esteemed photographers. As curator Elisa deCourcy notes, ‘Julia Duckworth’s lackadaisical pose and her flailing hand cast her as somewhat of a Pre-Raphaelite heroine, very much in the style of Cameron’s broader oeuvre’. DeCourcy adds it is perhaps also a depiction of the experience of maternal exhaustion: ‘Julia’s distant gaze and slouched form makes it hard for us not to read this photograph as depicting fatigued motherhood. Through touch, the children seem to demonstrate a sentimental connection to Julia while also laying claim to her attention and energy’.
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Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) Eleanor and Barbara 1954, printed 1970s Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1979
Harry Callahan began photographing his wife Eleanor shortly after they married in 1936 and continued to do so for almost fifty years. Discussing their relationship as artist and muse in a 1983 film, Callahan said, ‘I felt very natural photographing Eleanor. I didn’t feel like there were any obstacles of any kind’. Following the birth of their daughter Barbara in 1950 he began to photograph mother and child and, as can be seen in this image, often captured moments of family life in pictures of great intimacy.
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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Micky Allan’s Man holding his daughter (1982) from the People of Elizabeth series 1982-1983 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The application of hand-colouring to photographs was generally the work of women in photography studios until the 1950s. In the 1970s and 80s these superseded processes experienced a revival as some feminist photographers applied the historic treatment to their images of contemporary life. As art historian Elisa deCourcy observes, ‘Micky Allan’s vibrant hand-colouring radically alters the topography of this otherwise monochrome photographic portrait of a young father and daughter from the 1980s … The application of colour to the father’s and daughter’s faces and the “retouching” of their hair, eyes and lips with colour offers an illuminated realism to each subject’.
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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at right Gilbert & George’s FORWARD (2008, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gilbert & George (active 1967- ) Gilbert Proesch (Italian, b. 1943 George Passmore (English, b. 1942) FORWARD 2008 From the Jack Freak series Inkjet print National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Professor AGL Shaw AO Bequest, 2021
Writer Michael Bracewell described the Jack Freak series as being ‘among the most iconic, philosophically astute and visually violent works that Gilbert & George have ever created’. In this picture the Union Jack, an internationally familiar flag and politically charged symbol whose significance spans the cultural spectrum from contemporary fashion to aggressive national pride, forms the backdrop to monumental portraits of the artists. In contrast to this visual cacophony the artists appear as rather low-key, neatly dressed, senior statesmen maintaining their central relevance in a community that too often disregards the elderly.
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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, Ellen José’s Basket Weaver, Lake Tyers (1988); Roman Vishniac’s Grandfather and granddaughter, Warsaw (c. 1935-1938, below); Wolfgang Tillmans’ Lars in tube (1993); Ruth Maddison’s Molly O’Sullivan, 82 (1990); Naomi Hobson’s The God Father (2021); Donna Bailey’s Lush (2002); Carol Jerrems Sharpies (1976, below); and Nan Goldin’s Misty in Sheridan Square, NYC (1991, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Roman Vishniac (Russian, 1897-1990, United States 1940-1990) Grandfather and granddaughter, Warsaw c. 1935-1938, printed 1977 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1978
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Carol Jerrems’ Sharpies (1976) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, Huang Yan’s Chinese landscape – Tattoo (Number 1) (1999); four photographs by Hedda Morrison (1935, below); and Mervyn Bishop’s Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pours soil into the hands of traditional land owner Vincent Lingiari, Northern Territory (1975, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Huang Yan (Chinese, b. 1966) Chinese landscape – Tattoo (Number 1) 1999, printed 2004 Type C photograph National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 2004
In this photograph Huang Yan uses the human body as a canvas for the traditional shānshuǐ style of Chinese landscape painting. Discussing this image, curator and writer Isobel Crombie observed, ‘The title of the work, Tattoo, implies that landscape traditions are written permanently into the Chinese body, making them alive and active. However, ironically, the scenes painted onto the artist’s torso are clearly fugitive, alerting us to both the fragility of the natural environment and the transience of the body’.
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Hedda Morrison (German 1908-1991, China 1933-1946, Australia 1967-1991) No title (Fairy Palm Cliff) 1935 Gelatin silver photograph 25.3 x 22.8cm Purchased, 1976 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1976 Public domain
Hedda Morrison (German 1908-1991, China 1933-1946, Australia 1967-1991) No title (Three gnarled pines) 1935 Gelatin silver photograph 30.6 × 19cm Purchased, 1976 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1976 Public domain
Hedda Morrison (German 1908-1991, China 1933-1946, Australia 1967-1991) No title (Lone pine against clouds) 1935; printed 1976 Gelatin silver photograph 25.3 x 22.8cm Purchased, 1976 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1976 Public domain
Hedda Morrison (German 1908-1991, China 1933-1946, Australia 1967-1991) No title (Morning clouds) 1935; printed 1970s Gelatin silver photograph 25.3 x 22.8cm Purchased, 1976 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1976 Public domain
In August 1975 Mervyn Bishop travelled to Daguragu, formerly known as Wattie Creek, in the Northern Territory. As a press photographer he captured the moment when then prime minister Gough Whitlam placed a handful of soil into the palm of Gurindji elder and activist Vincent Lingiari. This photograph is an iconic image of the ongoing battle for self-determination for Australia’s traditional owners; however, the photograph is not as straightforward as it appears: the moment was re-staged outside so Bishop could take advantage of better lighting.
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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, Robert Macpherson’s Rome (c. 1860); Louis-Emile Durandelle and Clémence Delmaet’s The new Paris Opera, ornamental sculpture (c. 1870, below); Edouard Baldus’ Notre Dame, Paris (c. 1852-1853, below); and Véronique Ellena’s Santi Luca e Martina, Rome (2011) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In Véronique Ellena’s photograph we see a shrouded figure, draped in a blanket or canvas cloth, lying on the steps of a Baroque church in central Rome. Initially seducing us with the formal beauty of the city and its architecture, the photograph then jolts us as we recognise the harsh reality of the scene. This was a calculated strategy on Ellena’s part, as she acknowledges: ‘At first, we could only perceive the sublime beauty of architecture. But this work tells us something else: the place of some people in this world, who are there but whom we do not see – or not anymore’.
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Louis-Emile Durandelle (French, 1839-1917) Clémence Delmaet (French, 1838-1917) The new Paris Opera, ornamental sculpture c. 1870 Albumen silver photograph 38.1 x 28.3cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented by the Lunn Gallery, Washington D.C, USA, 1982 Public domain
Edouard Baldus (Prussian 1813-1989, France c. 1848 – c. 1869) Notre Dame, Paris c. 1852-1853, printed 1880s Platinum photograph National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented by the National Gallery Women’s Association, 1995 Public domain
By the middle of the nineteenth century many of the great historic buildings of Paris, including Notre Dame Cathedral, were in a state of disrepair due to decades of neglect. Under the auspices of the Commission des Monuments Historiques, significant historic buildings underwent extensive restoration. This committee recognised the invaluable role photography could play in documenting the changes occurring to the architectural heritage of Paris. Official Second Empire photographer, Édouard Baldus, captured the splendour of newly commissioned and lavishly restored architectural icons as cultural highlights of the Second Empire.
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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Véronique Ellena’s Santi Luca e Martina, Rome (2011); at second right, work from Girma Berta’s Moving shadows series (2017); and at right, Pieter Hugo’s Green Point Common, Cape Town (2013) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at centre, Girma Berta’s Untitled IV, VI and XII (2017) at right, Pieter Hugo’s Green Point Common, Cape Town (2013) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Girma Berta has been photographing people on the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, since around 2014. His earlier photographs were documentary in style, but over time his work has become more refined and stylised.
The five photographs from his Moving Shadows series 2017 … are from an ongoing body of work in which all background detail has been removed. These photographs show isolated figures, and their shadows, on immersive, coloured backgrounds. The works feature individuals photographed on the streets of Addis Ababa going about the daily lives. Using the camera in his phone, Berta is able to work discretely and capture his subjects without them being aware of his presence.
In all his street-based work, Berta is interested in presenting a ‘portrait’ of the people of Addis Ababa. Working in his studio, he has developed a method to extract aspects of the scenes he photographs from the city’s busy streetscapes. Berta explains further: ‘Through my work on Instagram, I wish the world (would) stare into the eyes of a face of Addis Ababa; the city where I was born and where I grew up. The beautiful, the ugly and all that is in between.’
Text from the National Gallery of Victoria website
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at second left, Girma Berta’s Untitled IV, VI and XII (2017, above); and at right, Dacre Stubbs’ St. George’s Road flats (1953, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, Gertrude Kasebier’s Gargoyle (1901, top); Albert Renger-Patzsch’s Art d’eglise in Achen (1930s, bottom); Werner Mantz’s Industrial Landscape (1937, top); Max Dupain’s Silos through windscreen (1935, bottom); Edward Steichen’s The maypole (1932); Barbara Morgan’s City shell (1938, top); Berenice Abbott’s Park Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, Manhattan, October 8 (1936, bottom) and Dacre Stubbs’ St. George’s Road flats (1953) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
For modernist architects in the 1930s there was a natural synergy between their own vision of the constructed environment in the machine age and the work of photographers. In architecture this was manifested in structural clarity and precision, and the use of modern building materials such as steel, glass and unadorned concrete. In photography the use of sharp focus, unexpected vantage points, radical cropping of images and unusual perspectives formed part of the lexicon of the so-called New Objectivity. Photographers like Werner Mantz show a world in which compressed space and unexpected vantages confound our expectations of how buildings should be photographed.
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Gertrude Kasebier (American, 1852-1934) Gargoyle 1901 Platinum photograph 20.6 x 13.5cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 1979 Public domain
Werner Mantz (German 1901-1983) Industrial landscape 1937 Gelatin silver photograph 38.6 x 29.2cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1983 Public domain
Max Dupain (Australian 1911-1992) Silos through windscreen 1935, printed c. 1985 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1986 Public domain
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Edward Steichen’s The maypole (1932) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) City shell 1938, printed 1972 Gelatin silver photograph 34.4 x 25.1cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022 Public domain
Barbara Morgan moved to New York in 1930 and began experimenting with the avant-garde photographic techniques of photograms and photomontage. City shell is an outstanding example of Morgan’s innovative photography from the 1930s. In this image she combined a view from her studio window of the Empire State Building with a shell gifted to her by a friend. The monumental skyscraper is shown tilted on an extreme angle while the shell appears upright in the centre of the photograph – a visual metaphor, according to the artist, for the transient nature of built structures in comparison to those of the natural world.
Wall text from the exhibition
Berenice Abbott (American 1898-1991, France 1921-1929) Park Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, Manhattan, October 8 1936 Gelatin silver photograph 19.3 x 24.3cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021 Public domain
In 1929, after living in Paris for eight years, Berenice Abbott returned to New York and, having noted the rapid change taking place across the city, commenced a project to document New York in photographs. Abbott’s project was funded by the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1939, which culminated in the 1939 book and exhibition, Changing New York. Discussing her project, Abbott wrote of desiring to capture the ‘spirit’ of the city, driven by the urgent realisation that ‘the tempo of the metropolis is not of eternity, or even time, but of the vanishing instant’.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Dacre Stubbs’ St George’s Road flats (1953, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dacre Stubbs (English 1910-2001, Australia 1948-2001) St George’s Road flats 1953 Gelatin silver photograph 47.6 x 38.0cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1993 Public domain
More photographs from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing William Henry Fox Talbot’s Portrait of a man (c. 1844, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) No title (Portrait of a man) c. 1844 Salted paper photograph 7.6 x 6.6cm irreg. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of David Syme & Co. Limited, Fellow, 1982 Public domain
Maxime Du Camp (French 1822-1894) Peristyle of the Palace of Rameses III, Medinet Habu, Thebes 1849-1851, printed 1852 Salted paper photograph National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1983 Public domain
Gaspard-Felix Tournachon Nadar (French, 1820-1910) Alexander Dumas (père) 1855 Salted paper photograph 24.4 x 18.6cm irreg. (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented by the National Gallery Women’s Association, 1995 Public domain
Alexander Gardner (American 1821-1882) Home of a Rebel sharpshooter, Gettysburg 1863; printed 1865-1866 Plate no. 41 from Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, vol. I and II, 1865-1866 Albumen silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 1979 Public domain
Around 620,000 soldiers are believed to have died during the American Civil War, which was fought from 1861 to 1865. Discussing the war, this photograph, and the work of Alexander Gardner, author and art historian Helen Ennis wrote, ‘The extensive coverage of the war that Gardner and his colleagues achieved – including its often graphic, confronting imagery – is lauded in the history of photography for its pioneering documentary photography and photojournalism. However, war photography has its own disturbing history, one in which photographing the dead has become routine. In Gardner’s photograph the corpse (and his rifle) may have been specially positioned for the photograph, a further reminder that in war death has no dignity’.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Julia Margaret Cameron’s Julia Jackson (1864, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Julia Margaret Cameron (English, 1815-1879) Julia Jackson 1864 Albumen silver photograph 24.0 x 19.1cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Herald and Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 1979 Public domain
Giorgio Sommer (German 1834-1914) Human imprint, Pompeii (Impronte umare. Pompei) 1873 Albumen silver photograph 19.8 x 25.5cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented through the NGV Foundation by Janice Hinderaker, Member, 2003 Public domain
Charles Rudd (Australian 1872-1900) Statuary Gallery, Melbourne Public Library 1886-1887 From the C. Rudd’s New Views of Melbourne series 1886-1887 Albumen silver photograph 13.6 x 19.8cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Terence Lane, 1990 Public domain
F. B. Mendelssohn & Co., Melbourne (Australian, active 1889-1900) No title (Young woman, full length, seated at plush covered table) 1889 Cabinet print Albumen silver photograph 14 x 10cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of C. Stuart Tompkins, 1972 Public domain
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Diane Jones’ Woman in black Dress (2009) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Writing about historical and contemporary studio photography, curator Sophia Cai explored connections between the work of contemporary artist Dianne Jones and historical vernacular portraits, noting that ‘Jones is a contemporary Balardung artist who works in photo media to critically re-examine historical and contemporary depictions of Indigenous peoples in popular imagery. Jones’s work sees the artist insert herself into familiar, iconic scenes from Australian art and photography to challenge myths of cultural nationhood and identity. This act of insertion is both a comedic and political action, as it not only highlights the homogeneity common to these scenes, but also addresses the lack of Indigenous representation in our histories and stories’.
Wall text from the exhibition
Unknown photographer (Japanese active 1880s) No title (Woman with umbrella) 1880s Albumen silver photograph, colour dyes 24.2 x 19.4cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Public domain
In the nineteenth century a distinctive style of photography developed in Japan in which the aesthetics of traditional woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) were translated into photographic practice. The resulting photographs included carefully composed genre images featuring traditional aspects of the life and work of the Japanese middle classes. Typical life scenes, such as this one showing a woman walking through a rainstorm, were recreated in the studio with remarkable attention to detail, as seen in the subject’s ‘windblown’ kimono. As these images were staged for the European market, however, they often diverted from reality in favour of focusing on customs that would have appeared ‘exotic’ to their Western viewers.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Frank Hurley’s A turreted berg (1913, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Frank Hurley (Australian, 1890-1962) No title (A turreted berg) 1913 Carbon print National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1999 Public domain
The photographs produced by Frank Hurley during his time as the official photographer for the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (1911-1914), and his subsequent texts, dramatically convey the awe-inspiring gargantuan icebergs encountered in the region. ‘No grander sight have I ever witnessed among the wonders of Antarctica’, Hurley wrote of the icebergs in the area where this photograph was taken. ‘We threaded a way down lanes of vivid blue with shimmering walls of mammoth bergs rising like castles of jade on either side.’ This photograph is, at first appearance, a sublimely ‘true’ representation of an iceberg. On closer inspection, however, subtle alterations become apparent. More real than real, Hurley’s constructed image was celebrated at the time and continues to be.
Wall text from the exhibition
André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) Chez Mondrian, Paris 1926; c. 1972 {printed} Gelatin silver photograph 24.7 x 18.5 cm (image) 25.3 x 20.4 cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1973 Public domain
Trude Fleischmann (Austrian 1895-1990, United States 1938-1990) The actress Sibylle Binder, Vienna c. 1926 Gelatin silver photograph 21.9 x 16.2cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022 Public domain
Trude Fleischmann (American born Austria, 1895-1990)
Trude Fleischmann (22 December 1895 – 21 January 1990) was an Austrian-born American photographer. After becoming a notable society photographer in Vienna in the 1920s, she re-established her business in New York in 1940. …
In 1920, at the age of 25, Fleischmann opened her own studio close to Vienna’s city hall. Her glass plates benefitted from her careful use of diffuse artificial light. Photographing music and theatre celebrities, her work was published in journals such as Die Bühne, Moderne Welt, ‘Welt und Mode and Uhu. She was represented by Schostal Photo Agency (Agentur Schostal). In addition to portraits of Karl Kraus and Adolf Loos, in 1925 she took a nude series of the dancer Claire Bauroff which the police confiscated when the images were displayed at a Berlin theatre, bringing her international fame. Fleischmann also did much to encourage other women to become professional photographers.
With the Anschluss in 1938, Fleischmann was forced to leave the country. She moved first to Paris, then to London and finally, together with her former student and companion Helen Post, in April 1939 to New York. In 1940, she opened a studio on West 56th Street next to Carnegie Hall which she ran with Frank Elmer who had also emigrated from Vienna. In addition to scenes of New York City, she photographed celebrities and notable immigrants including Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Oskar Kokoschka, Lotte Lehmann, Otto von Habsburg, Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi and Arturo Toscanini. She also worked as a fashion photographer, contributing to magazines such as Vogue. She established a close friendship with the photographer Lisette Model.
Sybille Binder (5 January 1895 – 30 June 1962) was an Austrian actress of Jewish descent whose career of over 40 years was based variously in her home country, Germany and Britain, where she found success in films during the 1940s.
Binder began her stage career in Berlin in 1915, then in 1918 moved to Munich, where she enjoyed success in classical drama. Between 1916 and 1918 she also appeared in a handful of silent films. In 1922, she returned to Berlin and received acclaim for her performance in Frank Wedekind’s Earth Spirit. Over the next few years she performed regularly in Germany and Austria then, in the mid-1930s as war approached and conditions in Germany became difficult, she made the decision to move to England.
Between 1942 and 1950 Binder featured in 13 British films, including several of superior quality. Her first screen appearance in Britain came auspiciously in the highly acclaimed supernatural drama Thunder Rock, playing opposite dramatic heavyweights including Michael Redgrave, James Mason and Frederick Valk. Other notable films in which Binder appeared were war drama Candlelight in Algeria (1944), hugely popular period melodrama Blanche Fury, espionage thriller Against the Wind and amnesia-themed romance Portrait from Life (all 1948).
Binder returned to Germany in 1950, settling in Düsseldorf, where she successfully picked up her stage career but did not attempt to break into the German film industry. She died on 30 June 1962, aged 67.
Walker Evans (American 1903-1975) Graveyard, houses and steel mill, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania 1935, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 39.5 x 49.5cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Near Wadesboro, North Carolina 1938; c. 1975 {printed} Gelatin silver photograph 26.4 x 26.5cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975
Joe Rosenthal (1911-2006) Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima 1945; printed (c. 1948) Gelatin silver photograph 11.5 x 8.8cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Francis Reiss, 2014 Public domain
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) The unmade bed 1957 Gelatin silver photograph 24.4 x 32.7cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023
In 1957, while teaching at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, Imogen Cunningham overheard her colleague Dorothea Lange set a task for her students to photograph an ordinary object that they used every day. Cunningham is said to have set the same task for herself. The resulting photograph, The unmade bed, is an image constructed with familiar objects, including discarded hairpins and a crumpled bedsheet. In this quiet and unassuming photograph, Cunningham has created both an elegant still life and an unexpectedly tender portrait of a woman recently risen from her sleep.
Wall text from the exhibition
George Bell (Australian 1878-1966, England 1907-1920) Pain 1966, printed 1991 Gelatin silver photograph 28.2 × 35.6cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1991 Public domain
Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) Berlin (installation view) 1982 From the Cityscapes (Stadtbilder) series 1979-1984 Inkjet print National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased NGV Foundation, 2018 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Hank Willis Thomas’s photographs printed on mirrors are sometimes difficult to look at, but with the viewer’s reflection integrated into the work they are also impossible to ignore. In this work we bear witness to the shockingly violent incursions into what was intended to have been a peaceful civil rights protest in Selma, Alabama. Willis Thomas’s work and its source image, a photograph taken in 1965 by Spider Martin, show civil rights activist Amelia Boynton Robinson being carried by fellow marchers after being gassed and beaten. Through his use of archival images Willis Thomas draws connections between historical moments and contemporary life, leaving little comfortable space to be a dispassionate observer.
Malala Andrialavidrazana’s series Figures are digital photomontages created using images sourced from archival collections of nineteenth-century maps of the African continent, as well as bank notes and stamps. The historical maps are overlaid with portraits of various heads of state and depictions of colonial developments and decorative details showing people, places, plants and animals from across Africa. These photomontages reveal the complex political and cultural histories of maps, cartography and archives, and the changing understanding of the greater African continent by European colonial powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Wall text from the exhibition
Section wall texts from the exhibition
Light wall text from the exhibition
Systems and Surface wall text from the exhibition
Surreal wall text from the exhibition
Narrative wall text from the exhibition
Work and Play wall text from the exhibition
Movement wall text from the exhibition
Studio and Things wall text from the exhibition
Display wall text from the exhibition
Consumption wall text from the exhibition
SELF wall text from the exhibition (missing)
Skin wall text from the exhibition
Community and Touch wall text from the exhibition
ENVIRONMENT wall text from the exhibition (missing)
Place and Built wall text from the exhibition
NINETEETH-CENTURY PHOTOGRAPHY wall text from the exhibition (missing)
Conflict wall text from the exhibition
DEATH wall text from the exhibition (missing)
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia Federation Square Corner of Russell and Flinders Streets, Melbourne
“For many people, secure and stable public housing has been their safe space from the vicissitudes of the world. No longer.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
February 2024
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Interior, children’s bedroom c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 9.7 x 7.4cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
Communities dismantled
Dismantled: late 16th century (in the sense ‘destroy the defensive capability of a fortification’): from Old French desmanteler, from des- (expressing reversal) + manteler ‘fortify’ (from Latin mantellum ‘cloak’).
At any age in life, having a stable place to live is vitally important to your physical and mental health. This is especially true for lower socio-economic individuals and families, older human beings, and people with a physical and/or mental disability.
The photographs presented in this posting by active Methodist and photographer F. Oswald Barnett were used to encourage government to remove the ‘slum menace’ – that is, a person or thing that is likely to cause harm; a threat or danger – in inner city Melbourne during the late 1930s-1970s. “Captured by Methodist social reformer F. Oswald Barnett, these photographs served to power his campaign to abolish the city’s inner-city slums and provide a better quality of life for Melbournians.”
“Slum portrayals were sensationalist and voyeuristic. Photos from the slums featured alcoholic mothers with loose moral standards, ‘vermin-infested kitchens’, and children riddled with fleas and head lice.”1
Of course, it is photography’s “ability to police and regulate its subjects, especially those lacking social and political power: the poor, presumed “deviants” or “criminals,” and workers”2 that is at play here. Value judgements about people’s lives and homes were made by do gooders, those of moral fortitude and in positions of power and comfort, likely those very people who had never experienced what it is to be poor, homeless or suffer from a disability. Class would have come in to it as much as the self lubricating disciplinary systems of church, state, hospital, prison that enable and enact power and control over others (Foucault).
And yet, and yet, despite their obvious poverty and “slum” residency (a squalid and overcrowded urban street or district inhabited by very poor people), F. Oswald Barnett’s photographs also document proud people and communities.
Observe the key of the front door hanging outside a hole in the door in Fitzroy. The key of the front door of the apartment house (c. 1935, below) and note the inference that “easy means of access is the open door to immorality.” A true moralists deduction given the evidence… whereas I would have thought it was a testament to the honesty and integrity of the community, and the lack of crime, that the key to the house could be left freely accessible.
In Carlton. Slum pocket (c. 1930, below) two older women stand proudly in their front yards, positioned for and staring at the camera, a broom propped up against the picket fence where one of the woman has been sweeping down the cobbled street. In North Melbourne. Group of children in Erskine Place (c. 1935, below) eight children stand in a line for the camera, quizzical, sullen, smiling, barefoot. Collectively the possess a sense of camaraderie. Witness the two boys holding hands at the left of the image, probably brothers, the one brother looking with love at his brother who faces the camera. This sense of camaraderie, community and family is something all the modernisation in the world can’t buy.
The plan to excise the slums ‘for the common good’ and for immoral reasons, did not go according to plan.
“But abolishing the slums was proving to be difficult. The ‘demolitions program’ was beset with problems. By 1940, only 53 families had actually been moved into new houses. Synchronising demolition works with the building program was hard. The Commission did not have enough resources, and lacked the support of the labour movement.
The Housing Commission upped the ante. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Commission launched the most ambitious slum-clearance projects ever seen in Australia. Residents in Fitzroy, Collingwood and Richmond protested and refused to move. In 1969, the Carlton Association launched a PR campaign denouncing the schemes.
Finally, four years later, the Victorian government abandoned the slum clearance schemes, but by then, whole communities had been dismantled. The buildings that housed them had been demolished.”3
Whole communities had been dismantled for no apparent benefit. And this is exactly what is happening with the demolition of existing public housing in Melbourne at the moment, to be replaced by a mixture of social, affordable and private housing, often tripling the number of dwellings in redevelopments and totally destroying any sense of community that existed in that place, where people actively looked after each other.
Cait Kelly, in an article on the Guardian website in July 2023 on the proposed demolition of the Barak Beacon estate in Port Melbourne comments on Margaret Kelly, the last resident left living in the estate. “When Kelly moved in to Barak Beacon she was a 43-year-old single mum who had spent years in and out of different homes. The housing estate gave her stability. She raised her son, who now has an international career as a game developer, grew flowers in the garden and watched as her neighbour’s children grew up. She said she was “shattered” to be having to fight to stay in her home. “This was our safe home,” she said. “And that’s what it’s been for so many tenants.”4
For many people, secure and stable public housing has been their safe space from the vicissitudes of the world. No longer. Today in Victoria and across Australia, these havens of security and community are being dismantled to be replaced by public-private housing, shared spaces and high density living.
Which brings me to the Grosvenor Precinct (Brunning, Woodstock & Grosvenor Street residences) in Balaclava. HousingFirst, a not-for-profit community housing organisation (providing social housing to over 2000 people across Melbourne) – which purchased the precinct in 1989 “to build and construct accommodation for older persons” – hand delivered a letter at 5pm on the Friday of a long weekend, dropped into the letterbox of each resident.
The letter states, “At HousingFirst, we work hard to continually improve our housing because we want you to enjoy living in a home that meets contemporary standards, where you and your family can live your best life.
We’re pleased to announce the redevelopment of our Grosvenor Precinct (Brunning, Woodstock & Grosvenor Street residences) in Balaclava.
The redevelopment will provide 68 new architect designed environmentally sustainable homes with modern amenity and beautiful shared spaces for all to enjoy.
To accommodate the changes, you will need to move out of your current home into alternative accommodation that will be arranged by HousingFirst for the period of construction. However, you will have first right of return to the new developed homes once the new homes are complete, and we’re confident the enhanced amenity with be worth the inconvenience.”5
This letter arrived without warning to the residents of the precinct on a Friday night of a long weekend without any consultation, as a fait accompli.
It is believed that the redevelopment of 68 units (which more than triples the number of units on the precinct) will be a mixture of private and public housing although this knowledge has not been formally addressed to the current tenants in the form of a letter. The percentage of public and private housing is uncertain in this point in time. And, despite the protestations of the letter, there is no legal guarantee at the moment that any of the current tenants will be offered first preference in the new development and apartments upon completion.
The older, disabled people who live in this “precinct” sit on a valuable parcel of land (and therein lies one of the major problems). They enjoy units close to the shops, with single or double bedroom villas with their own very small courtyard garden. It is a quiet precinct with little noise and no violence or drug use and the villas are modern and well maintained. The residents are now being placed in multi-storey blocks of flats with noise at all hours of the night, nowhere to house their pets, drug users living down the corridor and litter everywhere. Residents who have already been forced to move have noted that their mental and physical health has deteriorated under the stress of these new living arrangements. HousingFirst is destroying a stable, loving community that cared about each other for the sake of modernisation and, let’s be honest, probably profit.
The whole community is up in arms, both the public housing residents who are left in the precinct together with the residents of privately owned homes in the surrounding area, who themselves have formed a committee to oppose the redevelopment.
This underhand development enacted under a “cloak” of secrecy (see the definition of “dismantling”) has been thrust on vulnerable, older, disabled people without consultation … and is typical of what is going on all over Victoria, as public housing is torn down across the state to be replaced by a mixture of mainly private housing with a bit of public housing thrown in for good measure. All in the name of high density inner city living and supposedly more “modern” amenities without any regard to culture, friendship or community.
It is therefore ironic that the HousingFirst website states that, in terms of building communities, it is their belief that “social and affordable housing is the foundation on which we build strong communities… The service we provide is more than just a safe, secure place to call home. We know that homes transform the lives of our residents. HousingFirst helps our residents put down roots which means home becomes community.”6
Home becomes community! What a load of lip service…
In terms of their residents they state, “Everyday we work with our residents and stakeholders, developing relationships built on our values of integrity, respect, inclusiveness, collaboration and accountability.”7
In all of these areas, these values, their supposed values, have truly been washed down the drain.
As with the ‘excising’ of slum pockets for the ‘common good’ in the late 1930s onwards in Melbourne – an exercise of futility if ever there was one – so the destruction of perfectly modern villa units with their own garden, a small community of older and disabled people who look after each other, and their spreading to the uncertain winds of poorer physical and mental health (I already have reports that where people have been moved they are suffering with both) is outright social vandalism.
Talk about trashing your brand. Well done HousingFirst you have achieved that admirably!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Sarah Matthews. “Slums of Melbourne,” on the State Library of Victoria Blog website August 6, 2015 [Online] Cited 12/02/2024
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All F. Oswald Barnett photographs are public domain on the State Library of Victoria website. They have been digitally cleaned and balanced by Marcus Bunyan.
Building Communities
Our Belief
We believe social and affordable housing is the foundation on which we build strong communities. Securing housing first allows us to then support the well-being and full participation of low income, disadvantaged Victorians.
The service we provide is more than just a safe, secure place to call home.
We know that homes transform the lives of our residents.
HousingFirst helps our residents put down roots which means home becomes community.
Our Residents
Everyday we work with our residents and stakeholders, developing relationships built on our values of integrity, respect, inclusiveness, collaboration and accountability.
Anonymous. “Building Communities,” on the HousingFirst website June 2020 [Online] Cited 12/02/2024
The land at Grosvenor, Brunning and Woodstock Streets Balaclava was purchased in 1989 to build and construct accommodation for older persons. Construction commenced in 1992 with final completion in 1994.
The property comprises:
10 x 1BR units (2 in Brunning St, 2 in Grosvenor St, 6 in Woodstock St) 8 x 2BR units (4 in Brunning St, 4 in Grosvenor St) 2 x 3BR units (Grosvenor St) 4 parking spaces at Woodstock with street parking and resident permits available all units are wheelchair accessible.
DHS holds nomination rights over 2 units in each Brunning and Grosvenor, as well as for 4 units at Woodstock.
Map of Woodstock, Brunning and Grosvenor Streets, Balaclava, Melbourne
Photograph of the units in Woodstock Street, Balaclava
The Great Depression saw Australia’s unemployment rate rise to 32% by 1932, is seen through the eyes of photographer F. Oswald Barnett in his powerful images of poverty-stricken inner Melbourne suburbs such as Fitzroy, Collingwood and Carlton.
From the vault: Melbourne slums of the 1930s
The first video in our brand new series, From the Vault, provides a rare glimpse into the slums of Melbourne 100 years ago.
Captured by Methodist social reformer F. Oswald Barnett, these photographs served to power his campaign to abolish the city’s inner-city slums and provide a better quality of life for Melbournians.
This collection also tells a fascinating story about the history of Melbourne’s housing reform movement more broadly. Barnett himself was instrumental in helping to lay the foundations for what would become the Housing Commission of Victoria – although as you’ll discover in this film, its remit to excise the slums ‘for the common good’ did not go according to plan.
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Bathroom interior c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 24.1 x 19.1cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
Collingwood
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Collingwood. Glasshouse Street c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 5.4 x 8cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
View of road paved with bluestone disappearing between corrugated iron fence on left hand side and paling fence on the right. Weatherboard house behind paling fence. Large brick building bearing the words, “Foy & Gibson” visible in the background.
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Collingwood. Little Oxford Street c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 5.4 x 8.1cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
View of street with single storey brick/weatherboard/stone houses along the right hand side and other houses visible in the background. Girl standing on footpath outside one-roomed house. Two boys standing in the middle of the road and a car parked on the left hand side.
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Collingwood. Victoria Place. c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 5.4 x 8cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Collingwood. Plan of house, No. 12 Hood Street. c. 1935 Gelatin silver print, hand-coloured 10.5 x 6.8cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Collingwood. Hood Street c. 1935 Gelatin silver 5.4 x 8cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
Map of contemporary Melbourne showing two of the locations pictured in F. Oswald Barnett’s photographs of Collingwood
Frederick Oswald Barnett (1883-1972) was an active Methodist. In 1923 a visit to an inner-city slum shocked him deeply and, concerned for the welfare of the children in particular, he enlisted the aid of young Methodists in a campaign which led to the establishment of the Methodist Babies’ Home in South Yarra in 1929. At the same time he was studying part time at the University of Melbourne (B. Com., 1928); his master’s thesis of 1931, based on the result of 150 questionnaires, was published in 1933 as The Unsuspected Slums.
Barnett set up a study-group of forty people drawn from various community organisations, who met weekly in his office to discuss problems of housing reform. His group soon widened its activities to form the nucleus of the slum-abolition movement of the early 1930s. In his public campaign Barnett used a combination of scientifically gathered data and sometimes emotional presentation; he urged his audiences to write to the premier (Sir) Albert Dunstan, who finally agreed to inspect the slums for himself. In 1936 the premier appointed a Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board, of which Barnett was a member: it recommended establishment of a housing scheme run by a commission of experts, a policy which his group had long advocated. When the Housing Commission of Victoria was set up in 1938 Barnett became vice-chairman until 1948, when he declined reappointment.
Barnett frequently contributed to public discussion of housing, poverty and related issues through newspaper articles, public addresses and pamphlets, which included, with W. O. Burt, Housing the Australian Nation (1942) and, with Burt and F. Heath, We Must Go On: A Study in Planned Reconstruction and Housing (1944). In 1941-49 he was a director of the City Mutual Life Assurance Society Ltd and chairman from 1946 of its Victorian board, but he was asked to resign when it was known that he was auditor to Australia-Soviet House, Melbourne. In 1952 his was virtually a lone voice attacking proposals for multi-storey flats as public housing, in an address from his familiar platform, the Pleasant Sunday Afternoon at Wesley Church.
E. W. Russell. “Frederick Oswald Barnett (1883-1972),” on the Australian Dictionary of Biography website 2006 first published in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 7, 1979 [Online] Cited 11/02/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Fitzroy
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Fitzroy. The Bungalows c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.5 x 10.0cm mounted on card F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Fitzroy. A group of four cottages c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.7 x 10.0cm mounted on card F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Fitzroy. The key of the front door of the apartment house c. 1935 Gelatin silver 9.4 x 7.1cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Fitzroy. The key of the front door of the apartment house (detail) c. 1935 Gelatin silver 9.4 x 7.1cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Fitzroy. View from the Brotherhood of St. Lawrence c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.6 x 9.4cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Fitzroy. Rear view of house c. 1935 Gelatin silver print F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Fitzroy Town Hall c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 8.0 x 5.3cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Fitzroy. Tin house, Ward’s Lane c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.2 x 9.6cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
View down lane paved with bluestone. Paling fence on right hand side, single storey brick houses on the left, one appearing to have a tin structure attached. Double storey houses visible in the background.
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Fitzroy. Argyle Street c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.4 x 9.5cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Fitzroy. Martin i.e. Market Street c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.0 x 9.4cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
As far back as the 1850s, slums existed in inner city Melbourne. Slum dwellers lived a squalid existence. Often, they had no bathrooms, or sewerage. They lived in ramshackle housing, with leaky roofs and holes in the walls.
In 1923, active Methodist and social reformer F. Oswald Barnett visited an inner city slum. He was so shocked that he was moved to write the following lament:
WHAT CAN I DO?
Oh God. What shall I do about these little ones, These children of the slums, These helpless, unwashed babies of the slums, Who crawl along on bare and filthy floors, Who feed with sticky flies, Who play in evil-smelling lanes, Whose mothers cannot keep them clean, In body or in soul?1
Enlisting the help of other young Methodists, Barnett began a campaign for social change. Together, they successfully advocated for the establishment of the Methodist Babies’ House in South Yarra in 1929.
Barnett went further. Along with several other photographers, he began taking photos of the slums, using them as fuel in his push for social reform. The pictures, combined with emotive language, simultaneously shocked and captivated the public.
Melbourne historian, Dr Andrew Brown-May, observes that from the 1850s onwards: ‘Slum depictions, fashioned in words and illustration, endured as a powerful genre in Melbourne’s cultural landscape.’2
Slum portrayals were sensationalist and voyeuristic. Photos from the slums featured alcoholic mothers with loose moral standards, ‘vermin-infested kitchens’, and children riddled with fleas and head lice.
The campaign to rid Melbourne of its slums steadily gained momentum over the next century. In 1937 the Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board produced a damning report on the ‘slum menace’:
‘The Board records its horror and amazement at the deplorable conditions … Hidden behind wide, spacious streets there are slum pockets which are hotbeds of depravity and disease’.3
The Board recommended urgent measures to combat the problem, including the rehousing of slum dwellers and reclamation of slum areas. Its report led to the creation of the Housing Commission of Victoria.
In 1938, the Victorian government passed legislation to facilitate a‘war on slums.’ The Housing Commission was tasked with ‘excising’ slum pockets for the ‘common good’.4 The Commission built flats to rehouse the slum dwellers. At the same time, it went about acquiring cheap land in suburbs such as Coburg, Brunswick, Northcote, Fitzroy and Richmond.
But abolishing the slums was proving to be difficult. The ‘demolitions program’ was beset with problems. By 1940, only 53 families had actually been moved into new houses. Synchronising demolition works with the building program was hard. The Commission did not have enough resources, and lacked the support of the labour movement.5
The Housing Commission upped the ante. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Commission launched the most ambitious slum-clearance projects ever seen in Australia. Residents in Fitzroy, Collingwood and Richmond protested and refused to move. In 1969, the Carlton Association launched a PR campaign denouncing the schemes.
Finally, four years later, the Victorian government abandoned the slum clearance schemes, but by then, whole communities had been dismantled. The buildings that housed them had been demolished.
Society moved on to other concerns. But the slum stereotype lives on in our records. It is the only version of the truth that remains.
Sarah Matthews. “Slums of Melbourne,” on the State Library of Victoria Blog website August 6, 2015 [Online] Cited 12/02/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Carlton
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Carlton. David Street c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.3 x 9.7cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
View down paved street. Two storey brick houses on either side. Child leaning over front fence on left hand side. Two dogs, child and other single storey houses visible at end of street.
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Carlton. Two mothers c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 9.5 x 6.5cm mounted on card 15.2 x 10.1cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Carlton. Two mothers (detail) c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 9.5 x 6.5cm mounted on card 15.2 x 10.1cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Carlton. Carlton Place c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.1 x 9.5cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Carlton. Entrance to a slum pocket c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 6.4 x 9.7cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Carlton. Slum pocket c. 1930 Gelatin silver print 7.3 x 9.8 cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Carlton. Little Barkly Street c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.4 x 9.6cm mounted on card F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Carlton. Little Barkly Street (detail) c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.4 x 9.6cm mounted on card F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Carlton. Kitchen interior with woman and three children c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.2 x 9.9cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
Interior view of kitchen with open fireplace. Containers and utensils on mantelpiece above fireplace. Woman and three children seated around a wooden table in front of fireplace.
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Carlton. Wash-house and bath-room, 48 Palmerston Street c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.4 x 9.6cm mounted on card F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Carlton. Wash-house and bath-room, 48 Palmerston Street (detail) c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.4 x 9.6cm mounted on card F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
Contemporary photograph of 48 Palmerston Street, Carlton
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Carlton. Airedale Place c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.2 x 9.8cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Carlton. Somerset Place c. 1935 Gelatin silver 6.0 x 9.8cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Carlton. Somerset Place (detail) c. 1935 Gelatin silver 6.0 x 9.8cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) Carlton. Ormond Place c. 1935 Gelatin silver 6.1 x 9.5cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
Map of contemporary Melbourne showing five of the locations pictured in F. Oswald Barnett’s photographs of Carlton
One of the most visible and lasting effects of the Great Depression was the housing crisis in the poor working class areas of Melbourne and Sydney. Many of the nineteenth-century houses had fallen into disrepair, overcrowding was endemic and a great number of families lived in squalid and unhealthy conditions. Throughout the decade ‘slum’ abolition movements in Melbourne and Sydney ran public campaigns to place public housing on the political agenda, leading to the creation of the first state Housing Commissions.
In Melbourne, Methodist layman F. Oswald Barnett led a campaign calling for slum demolition and the rehousing of residents in government-financed housing. He took hundreds of photographs that were used in public lectures and to illustrate the 1937 report of the Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board. This led to the creation of the Housing Commission of Victoria in 1938, with its first major project being the Garden City estate at Fishermans Bend. In Sydney a similar campaign led to the Housing Improvement Act of 1936 and the construction of the first fifty-six home units at Erskineville.
Text from the National Gallery of Victoria
The photographs in the F. Oswald Barnett Collection were taken by Barnett and other unidentified photographers in the 1930s. Many of them were used to illustrate a government report on slum housing and/or made into lantern slides for lectures in a public campaign. F. Oswald Barnett was born in Brunswick, Victoria. A committed Methodist and housing reformer, he led a crusade against Melbourne’s inner city slums. In 1936 he was appointed to the Slum Abolition Board and from 1938-1948 he was the vice-chair of the Housing Commission. In this position he attempted to shape compassionate public housing policy. He later protested vigorously against proposed high-rise housing.
Text from the Monash Biographical Dictionary of 20th century Australia
West Melbourne and North Melbourne
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) West Melbourne. The lavatory to a Dudley Mansion c. 1935 Gelatin silver 7.4 x 9.7cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
View of a poorly constructed lavatory building on the edge of a stretch of water. Construction material is mainly corrugated iron. Rail freight car and industrial landscape in the background.
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) West Melbourne. The lavatory to a Dudley Mansion (detail) c. 1935 Gelatin silver 7.4 x 9.7cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) West Melbourne. A Dudley Mansion c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.5 x 9.7cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) West Melbourne. A Dudley Mansion (detail) c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.5 x 9.7cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) West Melbourne. A group of Dudley Mansions c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.4 x 9.8cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
View across hillside and stretch of water to a group of shanties. Industrial landscape in the background.
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) West Melbourne. One of the Dudley Mansions c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.4 x 9.7cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) West Melbourne. One of the Dudley Mansions (detail) c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.4 x 9.7cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) North Melbourne. Row of four houses c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 7.3 x 9.6cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) North Melbourne. Group of children in Erskine Place c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 10.0 x 7.5cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) North Melbourne. Group of children in Erskine Place (detail) c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 10.0 x 7.5cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) North Melbourne. Group of children in Erskine Place (detail) c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 10.0 x 7.5cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) North Melbourne. Hardwicke Street c. 1935 Gelatin silver 7.2 x 9.7cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) North Melbourne. Hardwicke Street (detail) c. 1935 Gelatin silver 7.2 x 9.7cm F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) North Melbourne. No. 19 Byron Street c. 1935 Gelatin silver print F. Oswald Barnett Collection State Library of Victoria Public domain
Contemporary photograph of Byron Street, North Melbourne with number 19 half way along on the left. All apartment complexes now…
Curators: Jim Ganz (Senior Curator of Photographs) and Paul Martineau (Curator in the Department of Photographs) at the J. Paul Getty Museum
Warning: This posting contains photographs of male nudity and sexual activity.
Installation view of the exhibition Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles showing the work Boy in Flood Dream, Ocean City, Maryland 1971
Arthur Tress: fantastical photographer
Definition of ‘fantastical’
1. strange, weird, or fanciful in appearance, conception, etc.
2. created in the mind; illusory.
I honour the work of Arthur Tress. Strange and wonderful, like something out of a fairytale or a nightmare, Arthur Tress’ ‘imaginary’ stories take the viewer out of themselves and into a different realm of being and believing. His staged, performative “magic realism” photographs – featuring the inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction – emerge from the psyche of the artist, from his deepest thoughts, feelings and dreams.
Taking advice from that another gay photographer, American Duane Michals (who works in sequences of images to tell stories), Michals told Tress that “a photograph can be anything”. As Michals insightfully observes,
“I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see…
Everything we experience is in our mind. It is all mind. What you are reading now, hearing now, feeling now…
There is not one photography. There is no photography. The only value judgment is the work itself. Does it move, touch, fill me?”1
It’s all in the mind.
Tress discovered his own way to tell stories, his own signature style, that was completely different from anything being accomplished in New York at the time by (for example) Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Diane Arbus, David Wojnarowicz, or Nan Goldin. Through the transmutation of metal into gold, or dream into photograph, Tress placed himself outside the trendy happenings of the Big Apple. In images such as the early Woman with Coin Operated Binoculars, Coit Tower, San Francisco (1964, below) – redolent of what was to follow – the disturbing Boy with Root Hands, New York (1970, below), Bride and Groom, New York, New York (1970, below) and Boy in Flood Dream, Ocean City, Maryland (1971, below), Tress reaches out an illuminates the dreams, desires and fears of children and adults.
What is disappointing is that neither the media images nor the accompanying text include any images from or text about what I feel is one of Tress’ strongest bodies of work, his photographs of gay fantasies. Can we not include these images for fear of upsetting delicate conservative sensibilities? I don’t know whether there were any included in the exhibition either, having not seen the presentation in person.
Again, created from the artist’s fantasies and imagination these works posses a tremendous élan vital, a celebration of sexuality and life. They also possess intelligence and wit a plenty. Witness, Band-aid Fantasy (1978, below) which is clever and sensitive in its fetishisation of the removal of a Band-aid from a friend; or the look on the face of Superman and the male subject in Superman Fantasy (1977, below) where one cock belongs to both: the penis of the male “standing” in for that of the super man, standing in for the always hidden power of Superman’s cock represented by the (irony: cut-out cardboard) phallic armoured body of the hyper-masculine hero, desired by the male with his lustful look. The photograph makes me laugh. If you are so further inclined, there are six pages of these wonderful gay fantasies on the Stanford Libraries Arthur Tress Photograph Collection web pages. Well worth a visit.
To my mind, Arthur Tress has always been an underrated artist. A courageous and dedicated photographer who forged an extra-ordinary magical path, it is a pleasure to see his work exhibited at the Getty.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Duane Michals June 20, 1976 September 1, 1976
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Tress credits his friend and fellow photographer Duane Michals with opening his eyes to the possibilities of his chosen medium in the 1960s, back when Tress’ photographs hewed more closely to the prevalent “documentary” style of the day. “He said a photograph can be anything,” Tress says, describing Michals’ approach. “It can be a sequence, you can write on the photograph, paint on it, make collages, tell a story. In the ’60s, that was revolutionary.”
As it turned out, Tress was a receptive audience for Michals’ manifesto. By the time the Brooklyn native had secured his breakthrough assignment in 1969 to photograph what he describes as the “endangered folk cultures” of Appalachia, Tress was already pushing against the dispassion of the documentary style.”
The first exhibition to chronicle the early career of Arthur Tress, one of the most innovative American photographers of the postwar era. During his first decade as an emergent professional in the New York photography world (1968-1978), his artistic practice evolved from being rooted in the social documentary tradition to a bold new approach drawing inspiration from the inner worlds of fantasies, daydreams, and nightmares.
One of Tress’s best known images from his Dream Collectors photobook, the photograph depicts a child emerging out of a discarded roof on a pier in Ocean City, Maryland. The effectiveness of this composition is remarkable given that Tress stumbled on the site and the subject by chance.
Wall label
Installation view of the exhibition Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles showing Boy in Flood Dream, Ocean City, Maryland (1971, above)
Installation views of the exhibition Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles showing works from his Shadows series in the bottom image
Arthur Tress’s Magic Realism Comes to Getty
Drawn from his imagination, dreams, and queer identity, Arthur Tress’s photography presents a surrealist world with fantastical subjects In the field of staged photography, Arthur Tress (American, born 1940) was a trailblazer, directing his subjects in fictional and often surreal scenes.
The first exhibition to chronicle his early career, Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows, on view October 31, 2023 – February 18, 2024 at the Getty Center, examines how his artistic practice evolved from being rooted in the social documentary tradition to a bold new approach drawing inspiration from fantasies, daydreams, and nightmares.
“Tress’s early work from his Dream Collector and other related series constitutes a remarkable artistic achievement and a major contribution to the history of post-war photography and the photo book,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “In a series of increasingly radical projects, Tress delved deeply into the worlds of surrealism and the unconscious, establishing himself as one of the most interesting mavericks of his generation.”
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Tress began his career as a documentary photographer in the late 1960’s, focusing his lens on the people of New York and the Appalachian region of the eastern United States. Initially concerned with such societal issues as poverty, pollution, and lack of open space for urban recreation, by the mid-1970s he began channeling his creative energy into more personal artistic projects that reflected his imagination, dreams, and his own queer identity.
This exhibition presents highlights from Tress’s major photographic projects dating from 1968 to 1978: Appalachia: The Disturbed Land; Open Space in the Inner City; The Dream Collector; Shadow; Theater of Mind; and The Ramble.
Tress’s early work is rooted in the social documentary tradition, recalling photographs made by Depression-era artists for the U.S. government. Tress’s Appalachia: The Disturbed Land captures scenes of poverty and environmental degradation in coal mining communities. The work was originally exhibited at the Sierra Club’s gallery in New York where it garnered positive reviews.
Tress’s next major project, Open Space in the Inner City, also reflects his concern for the environment as well as his interest in documenting problems facing young people. Set primarily in New York City and its environs, the photographs show polluted streetscapes and waterways, housing projects, junkyards, factories, and parking lots, and include both candid and posed images of children, families, and commuters. A central theme of the series is the general lack of open space for recreation.
Appearing as his first major photo book in 1972, The Dream Collector visualises children’s fantasies and nightmares. This body of work cemented Tress’s reputation for staging macabre and fantastic subjects at a time when the photography world was largely dedicated to prosaic realism.
Between 1972 and 1975 Tress created a series of photographs centered on his own shadow. The images reproduced in his photobook Shadow trace the mystical dream journey of an individual soul through birth, death, and enlightenment. Tress chose to use a wide-angle lens that alters the perspective and imparts a dreamlike quality. His only light source was the sun, which made early morning or late afternoon the ideal times to shoot, as the raking light lengthened the shadows, making them more dramatic.
In Theater of the Mind Tress explored his personal anxieties as well as the complexities of family relationships. He convinced his subjects to play out dramatic and sometimes disturbing scenes for the camera which were informed by the artist’s own psychic intuitions. Afterwards, when he shared the photographs with them, his sitters often remarked on his having illuminated an important but hitherto hidden aspect of their family dynamic.
One of Tress’s most personal bodies of work is an extraordinary series depicting the Ramble, a wooded section of Central Park in New York City known as a gay cruising ground. The Ramble was a personal photographic project that he did not exhibit or publish, as doing so could have exposed his subjects to embarrassment, harassment, or violence. Tress was still struggling with his sexuality at this time and making these pictures helped allay his anxieties, giving him something else to focus on in the Ramble aside from his own furtive sexual encounters.
“By revisiting an energetic decade of professional and personal work from 1968 to 1978, this exhibition enabled me to see more clearly how these early explorative years marked the beginning of a very personal vision, unique to myself, as an emerging photo artist – a peculiar combination of documentary realism and emotional responsiveness to the hidden mysteries of everyday life,” says Arthur Tress.
“I’m excited to have this amazing opportunity both in our exhibition and its accompanying catalogue to share an extraordinary body of work that is not well known to the general public, and to narrate the remarkable story behind Tress’s early career that has remained untold,” says Jim Ganz, senior curator in the Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs.
Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows is curated by Jim Ganz with Paul Martineau, curator in the Department of Photographs. Related programming includes Magic Realism: An Evening with Arthur Tress, where Tress will discuss his bold approach to photography, and the world premiere of Arthur Tress: Water’s Edge, an immersive journey into the life and unique vision of acclaimed photographer Arthur Tress. The exhibition is also accompanied by a catalogue, Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows.
Anonymous. “Arthur Tress’s Magic Realism Comes to Getty,” on the Getty website Oct 18, 2023 [Online] Cited 28/10/2023. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Photographer Arthur Tress’s “shaman vision quest dream journey”
Photographer Arthur Tress revels in the weird and fantastic – a hand sticking out of a bus seat, boys blending in with trees, children and adults playing against backdrops of rubble and trash – dark, spooky, unnerving images.
Tress, who spent time in his early career as a documentary photographer and traveled widely, staged his photographs to set a mood and tell a story.
Tress is one of the foremost practitioners of staged photography. He’s well known for his surreal photobooks, especially The Dream Collector (1972), but his career began earlier, in the 1960s, with commercial projects that encouraged his artistic development and anticipated his later fantastical works.
Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows (out now from Getty) looks closely at the artist’s early career, from 1968 to 1978, from his travels abroad through his return to the United States, stopping in Sweden, Russia, Appalachia, New York, San Francisco, and many other places. The images and quotations below are drawn from the exhibition catalog and take you into his world.
Tress traveled to Appalachia several times early in his career, and he became increasingly passionate about accurately representing the character of the destitute yet beautiful region and its people. Photographs curator Mazie Harris writes that the twisted branches and lonely image reflect the region’s “barren future.”
In 1969 Tress photographed “the Ramble,” known as a gay cruising ground in New York’s Central Park. But he never published this work, says photographs curator James Ganz, “because doing so could have exposed the photographer and his subjects to embarrassment or harassment.” Even the act of taking these pictures was dangerous at the time. This body of work is a deeply personal, intimate expression and probing of Tress’s identity as a gay man and also reflects much about the culture of the time and the anxieties, fears, and longings experienced by members of his community.
The image Hobby Horses, Harlem River, Bronx, New York (1970, below) is part of Tress’s series Open Space in the Inner City (1969-1971). It shows his environmentalism, which he cultivated throughout his travels, especially in his exploration of Appalachia. Having settled in New York after living in Sweden, Tress was shocked by the rampant urban blight and crowding in the city and how few open spaces there were for people to play, thrive, and live. His series helped bring attention to this widespread civic issue and was shown by institutions like the Sierra Club and the New York State Council on the Arts.
While Tress was at work on what would become his Dream Collector series, he sought the advice of famed children’s author Maurice Sendak, who is most widely known for the book Where the Wild Things Are. At the end of their visit, Tress offered Sendak the choice of one of Tress’s photographs, and Sendak picked Wild Man of the Forest, Central Park, New York (1969, below) which “evoke[s] the archetypal figure of the medieval wild man of the woods.”
Between 1972 and 1975 Tress created a series and photobook called Shadow. The work Shadow, Cannes, France (negative 1974; print 1975, below), featuring the artist and shadows cast by a sculpture of birds, appeared toward the end of the book in a section titled “Magic Flight.” Curator of photographs Paul Martineau says this picture – juxtaposed with other images of imprisoned shadows – symbolises freedom and “traces a mystical dream journey of an individual soul from the past to the present and into the future, through birth, death, and enlightenment.”
“[This] photograph of my father in a snowstorm is, in fact, a kind of surrogate self-portrait that mirrors my own hollow fearfulness about my own body’s decline and disappearance into a cold emptiness,” Tress wrote in a 2022 letter to curator Paul Martineau. [Last Portrait of My Father, New York, New York, 1978 below]
In 1970 Tress wrote about the magical properties of a photograph, and, surely, he is a visual magician, an artist possessed of a creative vision and intuition that allows him to connect to his subjects in a deep, revelatory way. Tress’s images pull you into his imagined, constructed worlds. His work is mysterious, surprising, surreal, and dreamlike. His images, the product of personal experiences and feelings, are universal in their play on and exploration of human fears, desires, and longings. He once described his series Shadow as a “shaman vision quest dream journey.”
Rachel Barth. “A Kind of Magic,” on the Getty website Nov 07, 2023 [Online] Cited 10/11/2023. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
In July 1969, while photographing the site of the Newark race riots that had occurred two summers earlier, Tress wrote to his sister that the police took him in for questioning. “They could have arrested me for being in the abandoned buildings – so I was very polite to them.”
While Tress was at work on what would become his Dream Collector series, he sought the advice of famed children’s author Maurice Sendak, who is most widely known for the book Where the Wild Things Are. At the end of their visit, Tress offered Sendak the choice of one of Tress’s photographs, and Sendak picked Wild Man of the Forest, Central Park, New York, which “evoke[s] the archetypal figure of the medieval wild man of the woods.”
The above image is part of Tress’s series Open Space in the Inner City (1969-1971). It shows his environmentalism, which he cultivated throughout his travels, especially in his exploration of Appalachia. Having settled in New York after living in Sweden, Tress was shocked by the rampant urban blight and crowding in the city and how few open spaces there were for people to play, thrive, and live. His series helped bring attention to this widespread civic issue and was shown by institutions like the Sierra Club and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Installation view of the exhibition Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles showing Hockey Player, New York (1972, below)
Between 1972 and 1975 Tress created a series and photobook called Shadow. The above work, featuring the artist and shadows cast by a sculpture of birds, appeared toward the end of the book in a section titled “Magic Flight.” Curator of photographs Paul Martineau says this picture – juxtaposed with other images of imprisoned shadows – symbolises freedom and “traces a mystical dream journey of an individual soul from the past to the present and into the future, through birth, death, and enlightenment.”
“[This] photograph of my father in a snowstorm is, in fact, a kind of surrogate self-portrait that mirrors my own hollow fearfulness about my own body’s decline and disappearance into a cold emptiness,” Tress wrote in a 2022 letter to curator Paul Martineau.
In 1970 Tress wrote about the magical properties of a photograph, and, surely, he is a visual magician, an artist possessed of a creative vision and intuition that allows him to connect to his subjects in a deep, revelatory way. Tress’s images pull you into his imagined, constructed worlds. His work is mysterious, surprising, surreal, and dreamlike. His images, the product of personal experiences and feelings, are universal in their play on and exploration of human fears, desires, and longings. He once described his series Shadow as a “shaman vision quest dream journey.”
Rachel Barth. “A Kind of Magic,” on the Getty website Nov 07, 2023 [Online] Cited 10/11/2023. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Installation view of the exhibition Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles showing the work Bride and Groom, New York, New York 1970 (below)
Child’s Dream of Redwood Monster, Santa Cruz, CA, 1971 on the cover
Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows book
Edited by James A. Ganz, with contributions by Mazie M. Harris and Paul Martineau
This richly illustrated volume is the first critical look at the early career of Arthur Tress, a key proponent of magical realism and staged photography.
Arthur Tress (b. 1940) is a singular figure in the landscape of postwar American photography. His seminal series, The Dream Collector, depicts Tress’s interests in dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and the unconscious and established him as one of the foremost proponents of magical realism at a time when few others were doing staged photography.
This volume presents the first critical look at Tress’s early career, contextualising the highly imaginative, fantastic work he became known for while also examining his other interrelated series: Appalachia: People and Places; Open Space in the Inner City; Shadow; and Theater of the Mind. James A. Ganz, Mazie M. Harris, and Paul Martineau plumb Tress’s work and archives, studying ephemera, personal correspondence, unpublished notes, diaries, contact sheets, and more to uncover how he went from earning his living as a social documentarian in Appalachia to producing surreal work of “imaginative fiction.” This abundantly illustrated volume imparts a fuller understanding of Tress’s career and the New York photographic scene of the 1960s and 1970s.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from October 31, 2023, to February 18, 2024.
James A. Ganz is senior curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
“Along with several others of his cohort, Arthur Tress spearheaded the resurgence of the directorial mode in the 1970s, as well as his generation’s engagement with previously taboo subject matter. With his unique blend of documentary and surrealist approaches, he has made a major contribution to his medium.”
~ A. D. Coleman, photography critic and historian
264 pages 9 1/2 x 11 inches 17 color and 198 b/w illustrations ISBN 978-1-60606-861-8 hardcover
Getty Publications Imprint: J. Paul Getty Museum
Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows book cover
Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows pp. 30-31
Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows pp. 40-41
Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows pp. 82-83
The J. Paul Getty Museum 1200 Getty Center Drive Los Angeles, California 90049
Curators: The exhibition is curated by Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, with Andrea Coffman, collection manager in the department of photographs, both at the National Gallery of Art.
Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880) Cathédrale de Chartres – Portique du Midi XIIe Siècle c. 1854, printed c. 1857 Photogravure Image: 53 x 73cm (20 7/8 x 28 3/4 in.) Sheet: 59.3 x 80cm (23 3/8 x 31 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, The Sarah and William L Walton Fund
The under appreciated photogravure process, which prints photographs in ink on paper, produces images of luscious lucidity.
In the “photomechanical process, which came to be called photogravure, a photographic image is etched into a printmaking plate, ink is rubbed into the etched surface, a damp sheet of paper is laid on top of the plate, and both are put through a printing press to transfer the ink to paper.” (Press release)
The prints are tonally rich and have a smooth, continuous tonal range and, depending on the choice of paper and inks, can be produced in a variety of colours and textures. While the process is time-consuming and labour-intensive nothing – except perhaps a platinum print developed in Amidol or alike whose negative has been developed in Pyro developer – comes close to the beauty and tonality of the gravure. “This intricate, painstaking and time-consuming method produces images with rich tones and a sense of light, depth, and realism.”
“The process offers the most sophisticated photomechanical means to reproduce large editions while still retaining the warm blacks and subtle shades of gray. It thrived into the 1930s, but World War II brought an end to its popularity due to costs and availability. As the spirit of hands-on experimentation returned to photography in the 1960s, Jon Goodman (b. 1953) is credited with its revival, and is lauded for creating sumptuous portfolios of the works of famed photographers Paul Strand (1890-1976) and Edward Steichen (1879-1973).”1
Some of the most beautiful photographs ever made are printed in the photogravure process. Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946), that pioneering artist, publisher and teacher, used them extensively in his influential quarterly photographic journal Camera Work (1903-1917).
One of my favourite photographs of all time, Paul Strand’s Wall Street (1915) is known only in two vintage platinum palladium prints, but is more commonly seen in reproduction as a photogravure print, notably in Stieglitz’s Camera Work Number 48 October 1916 (see below). “Wall Street became one of his most famous images because of his willingness to reproduce it in various photographic media and at different periods throughout his career.” (Philadelphia Museum of Art website)
Thus the reproducibility of the photogravure process led to the wider distribution of beautiful photographs. Crucially these hand printed photomechanical prints still retain an aura – of reality, presence and the hand of the artist, spirit if you like – unlike many reproductions in later photography books.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Robin O’Dell. “The Photogravure Process,” on the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts website Nov 15, 2020 [Online] Cited 26/01/2024
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) New York [Wall Street] Negative 1915; print 1916 Photogravure From Camera Work. Number 48. Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) publisher Image: 13 × 16.2 cm (5 1/8 × 6 3/8 in.) Sheet: 27.8 × 19.7 cm (10 15/16 × 7 3/4 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Please note: As far as I know, this photograph is not in the exhibition.
Discover an intriguing chapter in the history of photography, as innovative practitioners searched for and perfected a method to produce identical photographic prints in ink. The process, which came to be called photogravure, yielded some of the most beautiful photographs ever made – featuring delicate highlights, lush blacks, a remarkably rich tonal range, and a velvety matte surface. Etched by Light: Photogravures from the Collection, 1840-1940 tells the story of the first 100 years of this process. Artists and scientists working across Europe from the 1840s through the 1870s were dismayed to discover that identical silver-based photographic prints were not only difficult to make but also faded quickly. Building on one another’s discoveries, innovators such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Hippolyte Fizeau, and Charles Nègre perfected a way to etch a photographic image into a copperplate and print it in ink. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, photographers such as James Craig Annan and Peter Henry Emerson utilised this process to demonstrate the artistic nature of photography while somewhat later photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, and Laure Albin-Guillot used the technique to create large, bold pictures that they disseminated widely. Including 46 photogravures and 5 bound volumes illustrated with photogravures, many never before exhibited, Etched by Light shows how these works, through their proliferation, have helped shape our collective visual experience.
Bisson Frères. Louis-Auguste Bisson (French, 1814-1876) and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson (French, 1826-1900) Notre-Dame 1850s Heliogravure on chine colle Sheet: 35.7 x 27.3cm (14 1/16 x 10 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund Public domain
Joseph Cundall (British, 1818-1895) and Robert Howlett (British, 1831-1858) Crimean Braves – Men of the Trenches and Battlefields in the Crimea 1856 Photogalvanograph proof on chine collé Plate: 31 x 25cm (12 3/16 x 9 13/16 in.) Sheet: 55.8 x 38cm (21 15/16 x 14 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund Public domain
Peter Henry Emerson (British, 1856-1936) A Winter’s Morning 1887 Photogravure Image: 17.7 x 28.7cm (6 15/16 x 11 5/16 in.) Sheet: 21.5 x 32.4cm (8 7/16 x 12 3/4 in.) Mount: 40 x 50.8cm (15 3/4 x 20 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Carolyn Brody Fund and Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects
Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936) The Poacher – A Hare in View 1888 Photogravure Image: 28.5 x 23.7cm (11 1/4 x 9 5/16 in.) Sheet: 30.5 x 25.7cm (12 x 10 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons’ Permanent Fund Public domain
Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936) The Poacher – A Hare in View (detail) 1888 Photogravure Image: 28.5 x 23.7cm (11 1/4 x 9 5/16 in.) Sheet: 30.5 x 25.7cm (12 x 10 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons’ Permanent Fund Public domain
James Craig Annan (British, 1864-1946) A Black Canal 1894 Photogravure Image: 9.1 x 12.6cm (3 9/16 x 4 15/16 in.) Sheet: 9.6 x 12.8cm (3 3/4 x 5 1/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund and Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund
Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936) Marsh Leaves Published 1895 1 vol: ill: 16 photogravures on wove paper Page size: 28.4 x 18.4cm (11 3/16 x 7 1/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Harvey S. Shipley Miller and J. Randall Plummer, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art
Clarence H. White (American, 1871-1925) Spring 1899 Photogravure overmatted and mounted on gray wove paper Image (sight): 12.9 x 13cm (5 1/16 x 5 1/8 in.) Mat: 28.5 x 19.5cm (11 1/4 x 7 11/16 in.) Mount: 38 x 27.8cm (14 15/16 x 10 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Anonymous Gift Public domain
Mathilde Weil (American, 1872-1942) Beatrice 1899 Photogravure in sepia on chine collé mounted on cream wove paper Image: 16.7 x 9cm (6 9/16 x 3 9/16 in.) Sheet: 18.8 x 10.4cm (7 3/8 x 4 1/8 in.) Mount: 37.8 x 27.8cm (14 7/8 x 10 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Anonymous Gift
Clarence H. White (American, 1871-1925) Edge of the Woods, Evening 1900 Photogravure Image: 14.5 x 10.1cm (5 11/16 x 4 in.) Sheet: 28.5 x 19.8cm (11 1/4 x 7 13/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund Public domain
Clarence H. White (American, 1871-1925) Morning c. 1905 Photogravure Image: 20.2 x 15.5cm (7 15/16 x 6 1/8 in.) Mount: 20.7 x 16.2cm (8 1/8 x 6 3/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Washington, Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund Public domain
Etched by Light: Photogravures from the Collection, 1840-1940 tells the fascinating story of the search to find and perfect a way to print photographs in ink. The process, which came to be called photogravure, resulted in some of the most beautiful photographs ever made – featuring delicate highlights, lush blacks, a remarkably rich tonal range, and a velvety matte surface. Presenting 40 photogravures and 4 bound volumes illustrated with them (many recently acquired and exhibited here for the first time), Etched by Light shows how this process enabled photographs to circulate widely and help shape our collective visual experience. The exhibition is on view from October 15, 2023, through February 4, 2024, in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art.
“Discover an intriguing chapter in the history of photography, as innovative practitioners developed a method to produce photographic prints in ink,” said Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art. “Including photogravures from the National Gallery’s collection, this exhibition shows the pivotal role photogravures played in the history of photography by enabling the creation and widespread dissemination of tonally rich and lasting prints.”
About the Exhibition
From its very beginnings, photography revolutionised the way pictures were made and knowledge about the visual world was disseminated. But in the early 1840s, artists and scientists working across Europe discovered that it had drawbacks. The daguerreotype process, developed by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, created astonishingly vivid images, but each one was unique and could only be copied by making another photograph. William Henry Fox Talbot’s negative / positive process held more promise, but his silver-chloride prints faded when exposed to light. Early practitioners also learned that it was hard to make numerous identical prints that could be tipped into books or journals, owing to variabilities in the paper and chemicals that were used to make prints. Such obstacles, at least initially, frustrated their hopes of fully realising the potential of this new medium.
Divided into three sections, Etched by Light traces the search – unfolding across 100 years – for a process to print photographs in ink, which were more stable than traditional silver-based photographic prints. It moves from the experiments in the 1840s and 1850s by French and British photographers such as Armand-Hippolyte-Louis Fizeau, Charles Nègre, and Talbot, who discovered the chemical and technical components necessary to print photographs in ink, to the successful solution invented by Talbot in the 1850s and perfected by Karl Klíč in 1879. In their photomechanical process, which came to be called photogravure, a photographic image is etched into a printmaking plate, ink is rubbed into the etched surface, a damp sheet of paper is laid on top of the plate, and both are put through a printing press to transfer the ink to paper. Favoured from the mid-1880s through the 1930s, revived in the 1980s and 1990s, and still popular today, photogravures have a smooth, continuous tonal range, although an extremely fine grain is evident under magnification.
The exhibition also shows how photographers working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Peter Henry Emerson and Alfred Stieglitz, exploited the photogravure process for its artistic potential. They highlighted the individuality of their pictures through their choice of paper and inks, and even manipulated the photographic image itself. They also utilised the reproducibility of the process, inserting their photogravures into limited edition books, portfolios, and journals that they circulated in an effort to prove the artistic merit of photography.
The exhibition concludes with the work of modernist photographers, such as Alvin Langdon Coburn, Laure Albin Guillot, Man Ray, and Margaret Bourke-White, who used the process to enlarge small negatives, creating big, bold, and sometimes colourful photogravures. Circulating their photogravures widely in books and portfolios, as well as commercial advertisements, these artists demonstrated that photography could tackle new subjects, revitalising our view of life, art, and science, and in the process revealing critical new insights about the world around us.
The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington
Press release from the National Gallery of Art
Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born United States, 1882-1966) Trafalgar Square 1909 Photogravure Image: 21.2 x 16.2cm (8 3/8 x 6 3/8 in.) Sheet: 21.7 x 16.7cm (8 9/16 x 6 9/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund
Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born United States, 1882-1966) Brooklyn Bridge c. 1910 Photogravure Image: 19.9 x 14.7cm (7 13/16 x 5 13/16 in.) Sheet: 21.2 x 15.3cm (8 3/8 x 6 in.) National Gallery of Art Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund
Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born United States, 1882-1966) The Battery c. 1909 Photogravure Image: 16 x 15.56cm (6 5/16 x 6 1/8 in.) Sheet: 17.3 x 16.4cm (6 13/16 x 6 7/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The Street – Design for a Poster / The Street – Fifth Avenue 1896? / 1901-1902?, printed 1903 Photogravure National Gallery of Art Public domain
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The Steerage 1907, printed in or before 1913 Photogravure on cream moderately thick smooth wove Japanese paper Image: 33.2 x 26.4cm (13 1/16 x 10 3/8 in.) Sheet: 46.3 x 31.9cm (18 1/4 x 12 9/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Old and New New York 1910, printed in or before 1913 Photogravure on beige thin slightly textured laid Japanese paper Image: 33.3 x 25.7cm (13 1/8 x 10 1/8 in.) Sheet: 40.3 x 28.3cm (15 7/8 x 11 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) After Working Hours – The Ferry Boat 1910, printed in or before 1913 Photogravure Image: 33.6 x 25.9cm (13 1/4 x 10 3/16 in.) Sheet: 40.4 x 28.1cm (15 7/8 x 11 1/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The City of Ambition 1910, printed in or before 1913 Photogravure on beige thin slightly textured laid Japanese paper Sheet (trimmed to image): 34 x 26cm (13 3/8 x 10 1/4 in.) Mount: 43.3 x 32 cm (17 1/16 x 12 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Anne Brigman (American, 1859-1960) The Cleft of the Rock 1912 Photogravure Image: 21 x 16cm (8 1/4 x 6 5/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mark Katzman and Hilary Skirboll
Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born United States, 1882-1966) The Tunnel Builders 1913 Photogravure Image: 21 x 17cm (8 1/4 x 6 11/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Funds from John S. Parsley and Nancy Nolan Parsley
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) Électricité 1931 Photogravure Image: 26 x 20.5cm (10 1/4 x 8 1/16 in.) Mount: 37.5 x 27.5cm (14 3/4 x 10 13/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert B. Menschel
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) Le Monde 1931 Photogravure Image: 26 x 20.5cm (10 1/4 x 8 1/16 in.) Mount: 37.5 x 27.5cm (14 3/4 x 10 13/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert B. Menschel
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) La Ville (The City) 1931 Photogravure Image: 26 x 20.5cm (10 1/4 x 8 1/16 in.) Mount: 37.5 x 27.5cm (14 3/4 x 10 13/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert B. Menschel
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) Le Souffle (Breeze) 1931 Photogravure Image: 26 x 20.2cm (10 1/4 x 7 15/16 in.) Mount: 37.5 x 27.5cm (14 3/4 x 10 13/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert B. Menschel
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Virgin, Sand Felipe, Oaxaca 1933, printed 1940 Photogravure Image: 26.4 x 20.7cm (10 3/8 x 8 1/8 in.) Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Men of Santa Anna, Michoacan 1933, printed 1940 Photogravure Image: 16.1 x 12.7cm (6 5/16 x 5 in.) Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Boy, Uruapan 1933, printed 1940 Photogravure Image: 25.7 x 20.5cm (10 1/8 x 8 1/16 in.) Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Cristo, Tiacochoaya, Oaxaca 1933, printed 1940 Photogravure Image: 26 x 20.4cm (10 1/4 x 8 1/16 in.) Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Cristo with Thorns, Huexotla 1933, printed 1940 Photogravure Image: 26 x 20.5cm (10 1/4 x 8 1/16 in.) Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Church, Coapiaxtla 1933, printed 1940 Photogravure Image: 16.2 x 12.7cm (6 3/8 x 5 in.) Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Doris Ulmann (American, 1882-1934) Plate 35 1933 Photogravure Image: 21 x 16cm (8 1/4 x 6 5/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon
Doris Ulmann (American, 1882-1934) Plate 47 1933 Photogravure Image: 16 x 21cm (6 5/16 x 8 1/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
National Gallery of Art National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets Constitution Avenue NW, Washington
Exhibition dates: 23rd April, 2023 – 4th February, 2024
Curator: Barbara Tannenbaum, curator of photography and chair of prints, drawings, and photographs at Cleveland Museum of Art
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Album of 37 photographs c. 1887-1888 37 albumen prints Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
There are some beautiful photographs in this mid-week posting by the most eminent Indian photographer of the 19th century, Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905).
Dayal had access to the upper echelons of British and Indian society where he photographed in the Western tradition of formal portraiture and more personal views of the British occupiers and Indian nobility, namely the Maharaja of the semi-independent “princely states” of central India.
“Dayal posed and composed Indian royalty exactly as he did his photographs of British leadership, with the most important person in the center, often surrounded by advisers and subordinates. Head-on to the camera, stately but not overly formal, viceroys and rajahs alike became accessibly human but at imposing removes.”1
Will Heinrich in an article for the New York Times observes that what really stands out, what is really shocking are “the rows of Indian servants lined up like stiff accessories behind rickshaws, buggies and English garden parties” and the fact that “they were photographed that way by an Indian photographer complicates any easy read of what they mean.” And that none of the Indian servants is identified.
This should not be shocking at all… for the Indian world, as the British world, was all about status and power. You can see British servants lined up outside and behind the owners of stately homes in the United Kingdom. And they won’t be named. That’s because their social status made them invisible in name if not in physical appearance. They were servants.
And it should come as no surprise that Dayal photographs Indians in the way that he does because he aspired to enter the highest levels of British and Indian society – through his talent yes but also using that talent to advance his social climbing and social standing. By imitating Westernised portraiture of the ruling class both British and Indian, he sought to cement his stature as one of the country’s top photographers, picturing both the country and people through “an archive of depictions of meaningful sites, important occasions, and significant people that was essential to running a profitable studio.”
He took photographs of superb pictorial refinement and luxurious tonality. Through his talent and business acumen he became a man of importance, he had access to the upper echelons of society and his name is still known today … unlike all the anonymous men (and one woman) who are lost to the mists of time.
Many thankx to the Cleveland Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
A map of central and northern India showing some of the cities where Dayal took photographs in this posting.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Detachment of Bhopal Battalion at Indore 1886 Albumen print Image: 19.1 x 26.5cm (7 1/2 x 10 7/16 in.) Paper: 19.1 x 26.5cm (7 1/2 x 10 7/16 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
In state and military portraits, people seated in chairs and in the middle are generally of the highest rank. Amid these Indian soldiers sits a lone British officer. The Bhopal Battalion had seen combat just six years earlier during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, helping to keep Afghanistan a British-friendly buffer against Russia’s desire to expand into India. This detachment includes a number of Sikhs, identifiable by their neatly trimmed beards and turbans that cover their ears. Members of that religious group were avidly recruited by the British Indian Army due to their reputed ferocity and courage in battle.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Detachment of Bhopal Battalion at Indore (detail) 1886 Albumen print Image: 19.1 x 26.5cm (7 1/2 x 10 7/16 in.) Paper: 19.1 x 26.5cm (7 1/2 x 10 7/16 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) The Duke and Duchess of Connaught, with Col. Adam, Captain H.V. Benett, Col. Becher, Gen. Knowles, Captain Herbert, Col. Cavaye, Mrs. Cavaye, and Gen. R. Gellispie, Mhow 1887 Albumen print Image: 19.1 x 26.6cm (7 1/2 x 10 1/2 in.) Paper: 19.1 x 26.6cm (7 1/2 x 10 1/2 in.) Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
This gathering of British military officers was occasioned by the visit of Queen Victoria’s seventh child, Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn (1850-1942) (seated, second from left). His wife, Princess Louise Margaret of Prussia, is the woman on the right. As commander in chief of the Bombay Presidency from 1886 to 1890, the prince performed military inspections and embarked on diplomatic missions throughout India. Dignitaries’ visits were routinely commemorated with a professional photograph. The photographer often took the image for free, counting on the purchase of prints by those wanting to feature the dignitary in their parlours on walls and tables or in albums.
In 2016, the museum acquired 37 photographs made by Raja Deen Dayal (1844-1905), hailed as the first great Indian photographer. This exhibition marks the Cleveland debut of these rare images, all of which come from a single album and were shot in 1886 and 1887, an important juncture in the artist’s life. On display alongside Dayal’s photographs are historical Indian paintings, textiles, clothing, and jewellery from the museum’s collection. These objects provide viewers with insight into the cultural context and help translate the objects in the photographs from monochrome into colour.
Dayal was a surveyor working for the British government when he took up photography as a hobby in 1874. In 1885, he attempted to make it his career and by 1887 had cemented his stature as one of the country’s top photographers, British or Indian. This rare early album pictures both the maharajas of princely India and the British colonial elite.
Dayal produced formal portraits but also more personal views of the Indian nobility. In a moving portrait of a 10-year-old maharaja, Dayal reveals the boy beneath the crown. Weighed down by necklaces and jewels, he occupies a chair that is too tall for him; his stockinged feet curl under so they touch the ground.
Dayal’s talent also won him access to the highest levels of British society. He photographed government meetings and leisurely afternoons of badminton and picnics, costume parties, and even a private moment of communion between an Englishman and his bulldog. Dayal portrayed how the British brought England with them to India and in some images, the Indian servants who supported that lifestyle. The photographer cultivated his relationship with the military by documenting troop manoeuvres, several views of which are included.
Visually striking, seductively charming, and highly informative, these photographs and objects offer new insights into the early career of India’s most important 19th-century photographer and into British and Indian life at the height of the colonial “Raj.”
Text from the Cleveland Museum of Art website
Unknown artist (Central India, Madhya Pradesh) A Ruler Seated on a Terrace Worshipping at a Shrine of Radha and Krishna c. 1800 Gum tempera and gold on paper 25.1 x 20cm (9 7/8 x 7 7/8 in.) Purchase and partial gift from the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection; Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund
A noble clad in a black woollen shawl and a red turban, both with delicate floral embroidery, kneels before a small shrine with icons of Krishna fluting alongside his lover Radha. An attendant dressed in white holds a fly whisk that denotes the kneeling figure’s royal status. The black sky with light horizon suggests that the sun has recently set. In spite of the individualised facial features, this noble remains unidentified. Both figures have rosaries of rudraksha beads usually worn by followers of Shiva, instead of Krishna.
Unknown maker (Indian) Ornament 1800s Gold with green enamel ground, white sapphires, rubies, and pearls Diameter: 5.2 cm (2 1/16 in.) Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade
Circular ornaments were worn as pendants, sewn onto textiles, or pinned into hair. The decorative motif made of colourful gems depicting flowering plants was introduced during the reign of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1628-1658) and remained popular through the 1800s.
Unknown maker (Indian) Medallion 1800s Silver gilt with rubies and emeralds Diameter: 5.4 cm (2 1/8 in.) Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade
Circular ornaments were worn as pendants, sewn onto textiles, or pinned into hair. The decorative motif made of colorful gems depicting flowering plants was introduced during the reign of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1628-1658) and remained popular through the 1800s.
Unknown maker (Indian) Pendant 1700s Northwestern India, Rajasthan, Rajput Kingdom of Jaipur Gold, emerald, diamonds, enamel, and pearl Overall: 7.4 x 4.8 cm (2 15/16 x 1 7/8 in.) Bequest of Anne Jessop Smith
The large green emerald on one side of this pendant was probably imported to India from Columbia. Delicately incised with a lotus blossom, a symbol of the sun, it is surrounded by inset diamonds in organic, petal-like shapes. Emeralds, especially prized for their green colour, were associated with the planet Mercury in Hindu astrology and with the power to ward off evil in Islam. On the reverse, a peacock and two peahens surrounded by flowers are rendered using blue, green, and red glass.
Attributed to Balchand (Indian, active 1595 – c. 1650) Portrait of Murad Bakhsh (1624-1661) c. 1635; borders c. 1700s Mughal India, court of Shah Jahan (reigned 1628-1658) Gum tempera and gold on paper Overall: 28.4 x 25.7cm (11 3/16 x 10 1/8 in.) Painting: 4.3 x 3.5cm (1 11/16 x 1 3/8 in.) Gift in honour of Madeline Neves Clapp; Gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon by exchange; Bequest of Louise T. Cooper; Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund; From the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection
The miniature portrait of a Mughal prince is now mounted on an album page. Originally, it was in a gemstone setting as a “portrait jewel” to be worn by family and supporters at court. India’s ruling elite had been wearing portrait jewels since Sir Thomas Rowe (about 1581-1655) presented British portrait miniatures and cameos to the Mughal emperor as part of a diplomatic gift in 1616, when he successfully negotiated for British access to India’s ports.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) His Highness Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior 1887 Albumen print Image: 25.5 x 18.4cm (10 1/16 x 7 1/4 in.) Paper: 25.5 x 18.4cm (10 1/16 x 7 1/4 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Ten-year-old Madho Rao Scindia, the Maharaja of Gwalior (1876-1925; reigned 1886-1925), inherited the throne one year before this photograph was taken. Acceptance of both Indian and British cultural influences can be seen in the contrast of his garb, which is Indian from turban to shoe, with the Western-style furniture, clock, and books. Reflected in the glass balls on the table, which may be an inkwell or perfume jar, are the other people in the room during the shot. The person on the left in the top ball may be the photographer, Lala Deen Dayal.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) His Highness Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior (detail) 1887 Albumen print Image: 25.5 x 18.4cm (10 1/16 x 7 1/4 in.) Paper: 25.5 x 18.4cm (10 1/16 x 7 1/4 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
In 1887, a photographer named Lala Deen Dayal took a picture of Frederick Temple-Blackwood, First Marquess of Dufferin and Ava [below]. The men were in Shimla, in the foothills of the Himalayas, because the British colonial government in India moved there every summer to escape the heat of Kolkata. Dufferin was the British viceroy, and Dayal, who had worked as a surveyor for the colonial government before leaving to pursue his passion as a freelancer, was his official photographer.
Dayal posed Dufferin, a short, balding, goateed, intelligent-looking man, at the center of the photo, behind a round table covered in a patterned cloth. To either side of him sit three other men, all seven constituting the Supreme Council of Government of India. Beneath them is an enormous, intricately patterned carpet; behind them, a nondescript curtain and rough wooden walls. They look like what they were: fresh conquerors who hadn’t yet built themselves palaces.
They also look pretty discomfited by the camera in what were still its early days. Two look at the viceroy, who leans aside to deliver some incidental remark; one gazes at the floor; two stare stiffly into nowhere; and only one councillor, like a faint glimmer of self-awareness within the raj, peers suspiciously into the lens.
The photograph became one of a deep file of stock images available in Dayal’s shop. One souvenir album, assembled by an unidentified purchaser and later broken apart, was partially acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2016. In “Raja Deen Dayal: King of Indian Photographers,” the museum combines this cache of 37 photographs with roughly contemporary miniature paintings and objets to create a small but incisive look at cross-cultural projections of power – Dayal was official photographer to the British military commander in chief, too, as well as to the Nizam of Hyderabad, who gave him the title Raja.
An acute wall label next to “His Eminence Commander in Chief and Party, Simla” [below] draws attention to the tiger skin on the floor, flung carelessly under British feet; beside the photo, on the gallery wall, to illustrate the Indian association of this animal with royalty, hangs a 19th century painting from Rajasthan showing a “Tiger Hunt of Ram Singh II.”
It’s just one of the show’s many examples of the casual degradations of imperial rule, which also include an English-style silver teapot with a goddess for a handle, and a painting of an Indian servant walking British dogs – a mordant wall label notes that Indian art traditionally pictured “dogs and jackals” only in cremation grounds. But it’s the rows of Indian servants lined up like stiff accessories behind rickshaws, buggies and English garden parties that really stand out. They’re shocking, but the fact that they were photographed that way by an Indian photographer complicates any easy read of what they mean.
Also in 1887, give or take a year or two, Dayal made a portrait of “His Highness the Maharaja of Rewa,” one of the semi-independent “princely states” of central India. Draped in gold and jewels, with a stylized footprint of Vishnu painted on his forehead, slumping comfortably sideways in an ornate chair with his stocking feet curled underneath, the boy king is pretty much the opposite of the severely styled Dufferin. But Dayal posed and composed Indian royalty exactly as he did his photographs of British leadership, with the most important person in the center, often surrounded by advisers and subordinates. Head-on to the camera, stately but not overly formal, viceroys and rajahs alike became accessibly human but at imposing removes. In retrospect, Dayal’s pictures aren’t just portraits of royal and imperial power – they’re portraits of the nascent power of photography.
Unknown maker (Indian) Cap 1800s Velvet embroidered with gilt-silver–wrapped silk thread (zari); silk: lining; rubies, pearls, and spinels Overall: 6.3 x 15.2 x 15.2 cm (2 1/2 x 6 x 6 in.) Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade 1916.1477
Historically in India, head coverings were worn in outdoor and formal contexts and can signal age, allegiance, and status among Indian men and boys. A low round cap such as this was worn primarily by the well-educated aristocratic boys in the king’s circle. The painstaking process of creating the ornament involved wrapping gilt-silver wire of various dimensions around a silk thread core to create a textured appearance for the flowers and vines.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Maharaja of Rewa and Classmates 1886 Albumen print Image: 19.8 x 27.1cm (7 13/16 x 10 11/16 in.) Paper: 19.8 x 27.1cm (7 13/16 x 10 11/16 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Deen Dayal uses the arrangement of people and the architecture to point to the most important person in the photograph. Here, the Maharaja of Rewa is placed front and center. In this image, the young maharaja is shown with Indian teachers, but the instructional tools are Western: bound books and a raised relief globe (with Asia visible).
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Maharaja of Rewa and Sardars 1886 Albumen print Image: 19.7 x 26.9cm (7 3/4 x 10 9/16 in.) Paper: 19.7 x 26.9cm (7 3/4 x 10 9/16 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Deen Dayal uses the arrangement of people and the architecture to point to the most important person in the photograph. Here, the Maharaja of Rewa is placed front and centre. “Sardars,” inscribed on the picture’s mount, refers to the military officials surrounding him. After 1858, British influence dictated that Indian rulers be educated in European history and ideas as well as their local culture and history.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Maharaja of Rewa in Prayer 1886 Albumen print Image: 20 x 27.2cm (7 7/8 x 10 11/16 in.) Paper: 20 x 27.2cm (7 7/8 x 10 11/16 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Performing religious devotions was part of a maharaja’s duty to protect his kingdom. Praying before an altar, the maharaja fingers prayer beads and sits opposite a mirror, an auspicious object in Hindu worship. The lines painted on the men’s foreheads indicate that they are devotees of the Hindu god Vishnu. This group portrait demonstrates three ways rulers serve the state: by being a military commander, a worldly scholar, and, in this image, an observant Hindu.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) His Highness the Maharaja of Rewa 1886 Albumen print Image: 20 x 27.2cm (7 7/8 x 10 11/16 in.) Paper: 20 x 27.2cm (7 7/8 x 10 11/16 in.) Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Deen Dayal’s status as an Indian person may have helped him gain access to Indian rulers at the start of his career. The year before he received the patronage of British officials, Deen Dayal photographed ten-year-old Venkat Raman Singh (1876-1918; reigned 1880-1918), the Maharaja of Rewa. The studio portrait reveals the boy beneath the crown. He straddles a Western-style chair that is too tall for him, curling under his stockinged feet so they touch the floor. One of his many necklaces holds a painted or photographic portrait similar to the portrait jewel pendant in the nearby case.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) His Highness the Maharaja of Rewa 1886 Albumen print Image: 26.7 x 20.3cm (10 1/2 x 8 in.) Paper: 26.7 x 20.3cm (10 1/2 x 8 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Deen Dayal’s status as an Indian person may have helped him gain access to Indian rulers at the start of his career. The year before he received the patronage of British officials, Deen Dayal photographed ten-year-old Venkat Raman Singh (1876-1918; reigned 1880-1918), the Maharaja of Rewa. The studio portrait reveals the boy beneath the crown. He straddles a Western-style chair that is too tall for him, curling under his stockinged feet so they touch the floor. One of his many necklaces holds a painted or photographic portrait similar to the portrait jewel pendant in the nearby case.
Unknown maker (Indian) Turban Ornament (Sarpech) 1800s Gilt silver with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, topaz, blue sapphires, yellow sapphire Overall: 10.2 x 8.4cm (4 x 3 5/16 in.) Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade
This type of ornament would have been affixed to the front of a turban as an emblem of high noble status. The raised central element mimics the shape of an eagle feather or plume.
Unknown artist (Indian) Royal Elephant Ramkali with a Mahout c. 1761 Northwestern India, Rajasthan, Rajput kingdom of Mewar, Udaipur, Court of Ari Singh (reigned 1761-73) Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper Painting: 20.6 x 21.4cm (8 1/8 x 8 7/16 in.) Overall: 24.1 x 25cm (9 1/2 x 9 13/16 in.) Gift of Dr. Norman Zaworski
The mahout (elephant driver), directs the confident female elephant at a brisk trot, with bells swinging in response to her movements. This painting belongs to a series depicting the elephants in the royal stables at Udaipur, each one named in the upper margin. Elephants have been a potent emblem for royalty in India for more than three thousand years.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Ramkishore Singh of Rewa 1886 Albumen print Image: 20.3 x 27.3cm (8 x 10 3/4 in.) Paper: 20.3 x 27.3cm (8 x 10 3/4 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Ramkishore Singh, likely a high-ranking official or merchant, is depicted twice in the album, each time aboard a luxurious type of transport. In one photograph [above], he rides atop an elephant, a creature associated with India, power, and fortitude, preceded by an attendant on horseback. In the other [below], he rides in a European-style carriage pulled by two horses, flanked by attendants on camels (native to parts of India) and horses. Like the images of Britons in their carriages and rickshaws, these depictions suggest the sitter’s wealth through his possession of servants, animals, and vehicles.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Ramkishore Singh of Rewa 1886 Albumen print Image: 18.6 x 27cm (7 5/16 x 10 5/8 in.) Paper: 18.6 x 27cm (7 5/16 x 10 5/8 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Colonel F. G. Oldham, Simla 1887 Albumen print Image: 13 x 20.3cm (5 1/8 x 8 in.) Paper: 13 x 20.3cm (5 1/8 x 8 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
In Deen Dayal’s shots of large groups, the sitters are artfully arranged in close proximity, some even touching. But in his family portraits, at least in this album, the individuals are separated. Francis Oldham (1839-1923), an engineer at the India Public Works Department, poses with his wife Nora, their son Brian, an unidentified woman, and rickshaw drivers.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Colonel H.R. Thuillier and His Wife Emmeline Williams Thuillier, Simla 1887 Albumen print Image: 18.1 x 26.1cm (7 1/8 x 10 1/4 in.) Paper: 18.1 x 26.1cm (7 1/8 x 10 1/4 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
In Deen Dayal’s shots of large groups, the sitters are artfully arranged in close proximity, some even touching. But in his family portraits, at least in this album, the individuals are separated. The above image features Colonel H. R. Thuillier (1838-1922) holding his horse’s bridal, his wife Emmeline, their two terriers, and rickshaw drivers. Thuillier became the surveyor general of India the year this photograph was taken by Deen Dayal, who had just given up surveying for photography.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Colonel H.R. Thuillier and His Wife Emmeline Williams Thuillier, Simla (detail) 1887 Albumen print Image: 18.1 x 26.1cm (7 1/8 x 10 1/4 in.) Paper: 18.1 x 26.1cm (7 1/8 x 10 1/4 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) His Honor The Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab and Party, Simla 1887 Albumen print Image: 19.5 x 27.4cm (7 11/16 x 10 13/16 in.) Paper: 19.5 x 27.4cm (7 11/16 x 10 13/16 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
This photograph may commemorate a family reunion of the Lyalls. In 1887 James Lyall (1838-1916) (possibly on the left) was appointed lieutenant governor of the Punjab region, the same year that his elder brother Alfred Lyall (1835-1911) (second from left) retired as lieutenant governor of North-Western Provinces. After recovering from a serious illness, Alfred visited James in Simla. The women are likely Alfred’s daughter Mary Evelina Lyall (1868-1948) (left) and “Mrs. Lyall,” possibly Mary’s aunt, James Lyall’s wife. A master at staging group portraits, Deen Dayal used symmetry, proximity, height, and other formal devices to indicate the sitters’ interrelationships and relative ranks.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Lord Dufferin and the Supreme Council of Government of India, Simla 1887 Albumen print Image: 19.4 x 27.3cm (7 5/8 x 10 3/4 in.) Paper: 19.4 x 27.3cm (7 5/8 x 10 3/4 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Each summer, the British government left the heat of Calcutta for Simla in the foothills of the Himalayas, where this photograph was taken. In 1885 Deen Dayal began spending his summers there to be near the officials, who were both subjects and clients. The viceroy, or British ruler, of India, Frederick Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1826-1902), sits at the centre of this staged meeting of the Supreme Council. Deen Dayal made images of Lord Dufferin and his wife, herself an amateur photographer, that led to his appointment as photographer to the viceroy, which resulted in access to other members of the British elite.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) His Eminence Commander in Chief and Party, Simla 1887 Albumen print Image: 19.5 x 27.2cm (7 11/16 x 10 11/16 in.) Paper: 19.5 x 27.2cm (7 11/16 x 10 11/16 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
In 1887 Deen Dayal was appointed photographer to the commander in chief of the British Indian Army, Field Marshal Frederick Roberts (1832-1914) (seated, third from left). This casually dressed group of Roberts’s family and friends had just enjoyed a week of formal events, including a “fancy dress” ball celebrating the 50th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne. That party inaugurated a ballroom built onto Roberts’s home. The following day, Roberts was made Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire. The tiger skin attests to British success at big game hunting. Its use as a rug reveals a very different attitude toward this favoured pastime among the British than the Indians, for whom it symbolised royal power.
Unknown artist (Indian) Tiger Hunt of Ram Singh II c. 1830-1840 Northwestern India, Rajasthan, Rajput kingdom of Kota, court of Ram Singh II (reigned 1826–66) Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper Painting: 25.3 x 49.1cm (9 15/16 x 19 5/16 in.) Seventy-fifth anniversary gift of Dr. Norman Zaworski
Set against the dramatic backdrop of the cliffs that define the landscape of the small princely kingdom of Kota, a majestic tiger has just been shot by the king. Noisemakers with a firebrand drive the tiger out of the forest, and men at the right keep bears at bay. The women and musicians in two small boats look on in admiration.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) His Eminence Commander in Chief and Party, Simla (detail) 1887 Albumen print Image: 19.5 x 27.2cm (7 11/16 x 10 11/16 in.) Paper: 19.5 x 27.2cm (7 11/16 x 10 11/16 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
In 2016, the museum acquired 37 photographs by Raja Deen Dayal (1844-1905), hailed as the first great Indian photographer. These images, which show the British ruling elite in India and two boy maharajas and their nobles, had all once been part of a single photo album. Popular from the 1850s until the spread of digital photography in the 1990s, photo albums are precious mementos of a time or place. They served as status symbols and objects that defined one’s identity for future generations.
The album in question had been ordered from the photographer’s studio around 1888, probably by a male British official serving in or visiting India in late 1887 or 1888. This exhibition marks the United States debut of these rare, early photographs by Deen Dayal. On display alongside them are historical Indian paintings and luxurious textiles, clothing, and jewelry from the museum’s collection that help bring the photographs to life.
The client would have chosen which images he wanted in the volume, and he seems to have greatly favored portraits. Captions elegantly handwritten in English on the mounts identify the subjects. Most of the prints came from Deen Dayal’s stock images – an archive of depictions of meaningful sites, important occasions, and significant people that was essential to running a profitable studio. Nonetheless, it is likely that the purchaser of the album met many of the British individuals he selected – perhaps had tea or dinner at their homes – and spent time at a number of the locales depicted. If the visitor was on official business, he may even have been received at the courts of these maharajas. After all, this album was a souvenir of his time in India, something to jog his own memory in the future and to pass down the story of his glorious adventure in India to later generations.
How personal were this man’s connections with the sitters? A young woman identified as Miss Lyall appears in three different photographs and a Mrs. Lyall (most likely a sister-in-law but possibly a mother) in two of them. Was the album commissioned by someone courting Miss Lyall, perhaps even her future husband? We may never know, even though we can track the biographies of many of the British sitters and of the two 10-year-old maharajas, both of whom remained on the throne for almost 40 years.
What do these images, taken 135 years ago by an Indian whose business relied heavily on a British clientele, suggest about the British colonists and the Indian people over whom they ruled? Deen Dayal portrayed how the British brought England with them to India and, in a number of pictures, the Indian servants who supported that colonial lifestyle. These servants are never identified or even referred to in the captions. We see them posing alongside the British horses and dogs they walk, feed, and groom; hovering in the background at a picnic ready to offer more food; and standing at attention behind British carriages.
Visually striking, seductively charming, and providing much food for thought, Deen Dayal’s photographs and the related Indian art objects offer new insights into the early career of India’s most important historic photographer and into British and Indian life in late 19th-century India.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Miss Lyall, Simla 1887 Albumen print Image: 12.4 x 20.3cm (4 7/8 x 8 in.) Paper: 12.4 x 20.3 cm (4 7/8 x 8 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Miss Lyall, Simla (detail) 1887 Albumen print Image: 12.4 x 20.3cm (4 7/8 x 8 in.) Paper: 12.4 x 20.3 cm (4 7/8 x 8 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Mrs. and Miss Lyall, Simla 1887 Albumen print Image: 19.9 x 27cm (7 13/16 x 10 5/8 in.) Paper: 19.9 x 27cm (7 13/16 x 10 5/8 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
A number of Deen Dayal’s Simla portraits include rickshaws, which were items of great novelty, being found in India only in Simla at the time. The two-wheeled, human-powered passenger cart first appeared in Japan around 1870 and was introduced to Simla around 1880 by a Scottish missionary. The town’s steep hills required four drivers, two to pull and two to push. Horse-drawn buggies were another common means of transport. Miss Lyall and Mrs. Lyall also appear in the photograph, suggesting that they had a significant personal relationship with the purchaser of the album.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Mrs. and Miss Lyall, Simla (detail) 1887 Albumen print Image: 19.9 x 27cm (7 13/16 x 10 5/8 in.) Paper: 19.9 x 27cm (7 13/16 x 10 5/8 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Sir Auckland Colvin and Family, Simla 1887 Albumen print Image: 20 x 26.9cm (7 7/8 x 10 9/16 in.) Paper: 20 x 26.9cm (7 7/8 x 10 9/16 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Deen Dayal’s large glass plate negatives and view camera required daylight to capture people without a blur, so his large group portraits are usually set before the sitters’ homes in their gardens. The equipment also dictated that scenes be carefully posed, not candid, shots. Sir Auckland Colvin (1838-1908) and his daughters were photographed in 1887, the year he became lieutenant governor of North-Western Provinces, a position his father had once held. The sitters are arranged so they orbit two framed photographs displayed on a table, presumably depictions of Colvin’s deceased wife and son. Thanks to photography, the entire Colvin family was reunited.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Picnic party, Mashobra 1887 Albumen print Image: 19.3 x 26.1cm (7 5/8 x 10 1/4 in.) Paper: 19.3 x 26.1cm (7 5/8 x 10 1/4 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
This scene is from one of many lavish entertainments hosted by caterer, restaurateur, and hotelier Federico Peliti (Italian, 1844-1914) at his forested country estate outside Simla. In the photograph, Peliti is on horseback and his wife Judith on the swing. Swings have a long history as items of leisurely pleasure in Europe and India. Badminton, which originated in England in 1873, was popular in India. Deen Dayal may have been invited to document this gathering because he and Peliti, an amateur photographer, both belonged to the Photographic Society of Bombay.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Picnic party, Mashobra (detail) 1887 Albumen print Image: 19.3 x 26.1cm (7 5/8 x 10 1/4 in.) Paper: 19.3 x 26.1cm (7 5/8 x 10 1/4 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Reverend Loche at Neemuch 1887 Albumen print Image: 19.4 x 26.5cm (7 5/8 x 10 7/16 in.) Paper: 19.4 x 26.5cm (7 5/8 x 10 7/16 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
This building is a “dak bungalow,” one of the British government guesthouses that were central to the lives of British travellers in India. This network of houses offered places to eat, stay, rent fresh horses, and conduct business while traveling between residences. The bungalows’ wide latticed verandahs admitted breezes, kept out pests, and provided some privacy. The average British Indian military household had at least six servants; eleven Indian servants are shown here, including the only Indian woman pictured in this exhibition. Many images in this album show servants, but they are never mentioned in the captions.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Heavy Field Battery, Jhansi 1886 Albumen print Image: 18.3 x 27cm (7 3/16 x 10 5/8 in.) Paper: 18.3 x 27cm (7 3/16 x 10 5/8 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Exercises involving elephant batteries, which were exotic to European eyes, attracted spectators; photographs of them were excellent souvenirs of these military forces employed by the British Indian Army. Elephants had been employed in warfare in India since at least the 500s BC, but with the advent of heavy artillery, their function switched from attack to support. They transported big guns and supplies and worked in logging and construction. It took many cattle to pull a load that could be handled by two elephants.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Jhansi Fort and Elephant Battery 1886 Albumen print Image: 19.4 x 27.2 cm (7 5/8 x 10 11/16 in.) Paper: 19.4 x 27.2 cm (7 5/8 x 10 11/16 in.) Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Mr. Brown’s Horses, Jhansi 1887 Albumen print Image: 18.9 x 27.6cm (7 7/16 x 10 7/8 in.) Paper: 18.9 x 27.6cm (7 7/16 x 10 7/8 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade
Imported into India in great numbers by the British, horses were used for both transportation and sports such as riding, polo, and racing. Caring for the animals fell largely to Indian servants. Captions on the photographs’ mounts specify the owners of these animals (note that Major Sparks also has a monkey and pet deer). However, none of the Indian servants is identified. Nor would they have received a copy of the photograph because of their low social status, which was far below that of Deen Dayal.
Teapot (Indian) c. 1860-1890 Silver Overall: 14 x 21 x 13.5 cm (5 1/2 x 8 1/4 x 5 5/16 in.) Gift of Dr. Ranajit K. Datta
Made either for export or to appeal to the British community living in colonial splendor in India, this pot is a rare testament to the influence of the British Empire on consumer design during the period. Shri Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, crowns the vessel as an apt divinity to preside over the horse races depicted on the belly of the teapot.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Treacher and Co.’s Shop in the Fort, Bombay 1886 Albumen print Image: 19.6 x 26.3cm (7 11/16 x 10 3/8 in.) Paper: 19.6 x 26.3cm (7 11/16 x 10 3/8 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
The English in India approximated life back home instead of adopting local ways. This image, probably one of Deen Dayal’s stock photographs, proved to those back in England that the comforts of home were readily available in India. Treacher’s, a multi-story emporium in Bombay, offered a plethora of products ranging from drugs, wine, and electro-medical instruments to silver tea sets and rocking horses. Many goods were imported, but some local craftsmen had mastered traditional European forms for objects including furniture and silver.
Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905) Treacher and Co.’s Shop in the Fort, Bombay (detail) 1886 Albumen print Image: 19.6 x 26.3cm (7 11/16 x 10 3/8 in.) Paper: 19.6 x 26.3cm (7 11/16 x 10 3/8 in.) Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Cleveland Museum of Art 11150 East Boulevard Cleveland, Ohio 44106
“There is little love and tenderness here, little magic or generosity of spirit. Goldin’s attitude to the world at the time seems to be one of hostility and resentment. It’s all very well portraying the underbelly of society – the depravity, violence and degradation – but if your point of departure is one of anger and animosity, this is always going to be reflected in your art. I remember going out with my friends partying in the 1980s, the drugs, the sex, the pushing it to the edge, but you know what – we cared about each other. Nothing could be further from the truth in Goldin’s hedonistic (not heuristic) approach to her aura. …”
Over six years later it was time to reevaluate my feelings towards the work by looking again. Had my feelings changed in the intervening years? Or was I just being an obtuse human at the time who couldn’t see what everyone else could see, the genius of the work?
I have reflected long and hard on my feelings in relation to these photographs. Perhaps I was too close to the subject matter, that the series cut too close to the bone: many years of partying in London taking drugs, so many friends and lovers lost to HIV/AIDS. But that is not the case.
The problem for me with this work is its rather sad detachment from life and a pervading sadness attached to each of these photographs. While Goldin announces that “For me it is not a detachment to take a picture” I feel the opposite is true: Goldin seems uber detached when taking these photographs. The artist goes “diving for pearls” hoping to create some magical, random psychological subtexts where the subconscious is made visible, but she doesn’t ever know whether it’s her or the camera’s subconscious that is revealed or who (the camera or the artist) is doing the work. So much for knowing thyself, being responsible to the world, to others, and to oneself, intellectually, morally, and practically.
While the diaristic photographs of this “seminal” body of work feature intimate moments of love and loss, moments of bohemian sex, transgression, beauty, spontaneity, and suffering captured in photographs of “unflinching candour, rich hues, and a keen sense of empathy and lyricism” where is the real Goldin in all of this observational performance (Goldin says her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’.) I’ll just leave that one there…
What I would really like to see is the full 700 slide sequence, live, with the music that was supposed to go with these slides. I want to feel the context of these photographs and their intimacies in the flesh with the freshness and passion of what was happening at the time in New York:
Images and words and music
the real memory the real experience
HIV/AIDS death life bitterness love anger immediacy
Mark Morrisroe David Wojnarowicz Peter Hujar Cookie Mueller Keith Haring Kiki Smith
addiction music with the ballad of sexual dependency = I put a spell on you witness… to life, to the hurt conformity and denial rebellion
Each period reframes issues surrounding gender, sex, drug use and death … and what it means to be free. These images would feel totally different in 1980s New York but today, they feel cold, desperate and sad and I can’t identify with them or their photographic pathology, their study of suffering.
Have my feelings changed towards this work six years on. Yes they have. I more fully appreciate their photographic snapshot composition, their colour, their diaristic bravado. But I still don’t like their energy…. nor their masochistic indulgence.
Perhaps I just want to feel the real memory, the real experience (the energy and atmosphere of being in New York at the time) not viewed through the prism of this distanced, distancing monologue.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Australia for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The photographs in Nan Goldin’s The ballad of sexual dependency depict the everyday lives, often in intimate detail, of people in Goldin’s immediate community during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Please be advised that works of art in this exhibition depict explicit nudity, sexual acts, drug use, and the impacts of violence against women. Viewer discretion is advised. This exhibition is not suitable for children under the age of 15.
‘For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody – it’s a caress, I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.’
Nan Goldin
‘The people who have been photographed extensively by me feel that my camera is as much a part of their life as any other aspect of their life with me. It then becomes perfectly natural to be photographed. It ceases to be an external experience and becomes a part of the relationship, which is heightened by the camera, not distanced. The camera connects me to the experience and clarifies what is going on between me and the subject.’
Nan Goldin, wall text from the exhibition
“Since David Armstrong and I were young he always referred to photography as “diving for pearls.” If you took a million pictures you were lucky to come out with one or two gems. … I never learned control over my machines. I made every mistake in the book. But the technical mistakes allowed for magic. … Random psychological subtexts that I never would have thought to intentionally create. The subconscious made visible – though whether mine or the camera’s I don’t know …”
Nan Goldin. “Diving for Pearls,” quoted in Hilton Als. “Nan Goldin’s Life in Progress,” on The New Yorker website, July 4, 2016 [Online] Cited 18/11/2021
‘Nan Goldin’s nostalgic snapshots depict intimate moments of bohemian sex, transgression, beauty, spontaneity, and suffering. Her frames are marked by unflinching candour, rich hues, and a keen sense of empathy and lyricism. Goldin’s most famous work, ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ (1985), is a slideshow that presents nearly 700 images from her life in New York [and around the world] during the 1970s and ’80s; throughout the reel, the artist lies in bed with her lover, drag queens kiss in bars, and the AIDS epidemic ravages the photographer’s community.’
Anonymous text from the Artsy website
All The Beauty And The Bloodshed Official Trailer
Directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All the Beauty And The Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis.
Installation views, Nan Goldin: the ballad of sexual dependency, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri / Canberra, 2023 Photos: Karlee Holland
The ballad of sexual dependency is a defining artwork of the 1980s. Nan Goldin’s extended photographic study of her chosen family – her ‘tribe’ – began life as a slide show screened in the clubs and bars of New York where Goldin and her friends worked and played. The slide show was then distilled to a series of 126 photographs, which has recently become part of the National Gallery’s collection.
Goldin takes photographs to connect, to keep the people she loves in her memory. She is committed to the idea that photography can faithfully record a time and place, and do so in a way that has real social purpose. Using a documentary, snapshot style, she lays bare her life in the manner of a family album. We see her alongside her friends and lovers as they live their lives – hanging out, falling in and out of love, having children. But this is a community that would be decimated by HIV / AIDS and drug-related deaths. The ballad has become as much a testament to how much Goldin and her community have lost, as it is a record of the look and feel of a past time.
Goldin refers to The ballad as her ‘public diary’, stating that her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’. The work’s overriding themes, she has stated, are those of love and empathy and the tension between autonomy and interdependence in relationships – relationships in which all genders struggle to find a common language.
Nan Goldin is one of the world’s most influential photographers and her iconic series of 126 photographs The ballad of sexual dependency is a defining artwork of the 1980s. The National Gallery recently acquired the last, complete edition of this cornerstone work, which will be shown at the Gallery from 8 July.
Decades in the making, Goldin’s extended photographic study of her chosen family – her ‘tribe’ – is a deeply moving portrayal of life in the 1970s and 1980s, as the artist and her loved ones navigate a time of unrelenting energy and extremes.
National Gallery Curator of Photography Anne O’Hehir said Goldin’s rich and evocative series explores themes of sexual identity, community, and love and loss against the backdrop of New York City and has shaped a generation who’ve fallen in love with the unvarnished intimacy of her storytelling.
‘Goldin takes photographs to connect, to keep the people she loves in her memory. She is committed to the idea that photography can faithfully record a time and place and do so in a way that has real social purpose,’ O’Hehir said.
‘Using a documentary, snapshot style, she lays bare her life in the manner of a family album. We see her alongside her friends and lovers as they live their lives – hanging out, falling in and out of love, having children. But this is a community that would soon be decimated by HIV / AIDS and drug-related deaths.
‘The ballad of sexual dependency has become as much a testament to how much Goldin and her community have lost, as it is a record of the look and feel of a past time.’
O’Hehir said this engaged and at times moving series urges you to empathise with stories and experiences that are rarely depicted. ‘Goldin is committed to making public that which is usually hidden and private, and to the truthful recording of her life,’ O’Hehir said.
Goldin refers to The ballad of sexual dependency as her ‘public diary’, stating that her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’. The work’s overriding themes, she has stated, are those of love and empathy and the tension between autonomy and interdependence in relationships – relationships in which all genders struggle to find a common language.
The ballad of sexual dependency began its life as a slideshow presented by Goldin at parties and in clubs and bars in New York City’s downtown art scene. The slide show was then distilled to a series of 126 photographs, which are now part of the national collection.
The opening of The ballad of sexual dependency at the National Gallery coincides with the release of Goldin’s acclaimed documentary All The Beauty And The Bloodshed on DocPlay. Directed by Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All The Beauty And The Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about Goldin’s life, work and activism, focussing on her recent fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis. The biographical film will also be screened at the National Gallery on Saturday 22 July.
Nan Goldin’s The ballad of sexual dependency is free and will be on display at the National Gallery in Kamberri / Canberra from 8 July 2023 – 28 Jan 2024. This exhibition is part of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th Anniversary celebrations and continues the Know My Name gender equity initiative. Nan Goldin’s exhibition The ballad of sexual dependency is supported by DocPlay, the streaming home of the world’s best documentaries.
Curator: Anne O’Hehir, Curator, Photography
Press release from the National Gallery of Australia
“Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy – with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence. The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”
Donna Haraway, 2016
“… according to one’s structure and position, each of us sees certain facets, certain parts of facets (…).”
Alberto Giacometti
It’s great to see Melbourne artist Hoda Afshar have a mid-career survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. With her strong bodies of work over recent years she surely deserves such an accolade.
Unfortunately I can’t make any comment on the exhibition Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line itself – its flow from body of work to body of work, from space to space; the colours used behind the photographs; the sequencing of the work; and how the different sizes of the photographs bring the viewer forward and push them back – because I have not seen the exhibition. But, as always with the work of Afshar, it would seem her compassionate, lyrical, conceptual images are displayed with a clear seeing and focus on the stories that the artist wishes to tell.
Many words have been written by others (below) about significant aspects of Afshar’s work: the layers of displacement, difference and marginality; othering and image-making; war, statelessness, diaspora, oppression, corruption, torment, identity, place … which relate to the “relativity of reality” (the view that people are active participants in the construction of their own reality) imbued in her work. Indeed, “concepts of identity develop across the social spectrum – from within the self, within the culture, and within the political arena.”1 You can read these texts at your leisure. But from what I can see in the media images the exhibition exemplifies, as writer Celina Lei notes, “how her practice has matured while still carrying forth that visual pull – aesthetically, intellectually and emotionally.”
From what I can observe and feel the images are strongly composed, rigorously conceived and carry emotional weight when combined in sequences. Single images are ambiguous but when combined into a flow of images the narrative comes alive. People are framed against contextless backgrounds, they turn away from the camera, they shield their eyes and their identity or have their faces obscured by tree branches – so much of Afshar’s work is about absence, loss, longing, persecution, the impermanence of identity and the conflicting perceptions of a constructed, lived reality.
What I take issue with is John McDonald’s comparison of Afshar’s work with that of William Eggleston: works in her ongoing series In the exodus, I love you more (2014-) which capture diverse images of Iran “have the same mixture of ordinariness and oddity one finds in the work of a photographer such as William Eggleston.”2 Nothing could be farther from a form of reality. Eggleston’s images are never ordinary, are frequently surreal and bizarre, shot from a low or high angle (often with lurid colour ways) and possess a cutting social commentary on American culture … whereas Afshar’s photographs are poetic, sublime, lyrical emanations of ‘reality’ and if they do picture some oddity they lack the intense “bite” of an Eggleston image – something I would like to see Afshar reintroduce into her image making.
Many of her images are reflective, meditative, and approach the subject matter in an oblique manner which illuminates “how photography can activate new ways of thinking” … all well and good, but I long for a little more guts and directness to some of her individual images (physically, literally not intellectually). Her early series Under Western Eyes for example, contains biting, quirky creativity but for obvious reasons has not been included in this exhibition because it doesn’t fit the style of the smooth, polished, buffed, ambiguous and other worldly later work.
I also take issue with Tom Williams’ observation. “Even in her early, nominally “documentary” series, you can sense an embracing of the ambiguity of the still image, and an interest in composing a reality more vivid (and perhaps genuine) than dispassionate reportage might be capable of.”3
I disagree with the second part of this statement.
Having recently spent hours assembling a huge posting of photographs on the war in Ukraine – images which picture the ordinariness and atrocity of war – nothing, literally nothing, can be more vivid and genuine than the images of that war captured by brave Ukrainian photographers (see examples below). The same can be said of the genocide happening in Gaza and the photographs emerging from that massacre.
But as John McDonald intelligently observes, “The tragic events that have unfolded in Israel and Gaza over the past month should be enough to remind us that art is powerless in the face of real political upheaval. The most an artist can do to effect social and political change is to create a few striking images that circulate beyond the thought-absorbing walls of the art museum. Even then, any change to people’s attitudes is bound to be incremental and highly personal.”4
Most images then, have little power to change public and personal opinion… all they can do is proffer alternate visions and interpretations of the world and hope that some glimmer of recognition of injustice, difference and otherness will permeate the mind of the viewer. And while Afshar’s photographs do not affect social and political change what they do is bring to consciousness in the viewer “other” aspects of the realities of the world. Through the visibility of her images she exposes the phallocracy of the masculine, singular definition of truth. As David Smail suggests when speaking on the nature of ‘truth’,
“Though the truth is not just a matter of personal perspective, neither is it fixed and certain, objectively ‘out there’ and independent of human knowing. ‘The truth’ changes according to, among other things, developments and alterations in our values and understandings… the ‘non-finality’ of truth is not to be confused with a simple relativity of ‘truths’.”5
Afshar’s photographs address the simple relativity of many ‘truths’, the tension between “forms” … of truth and reality. Truths and realities, what is seen and not seen. So much of being alive is breaking…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ Ari Hakkarainen. “‘The Urgency of Resistance’: Rehearsals of Death in the Photography of David Wojnarowicz” 2018
5/ David Smail. Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1984, p. 152.
Many thankx to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Mstyslav Chernov (Ukrainian, b. 1985) / AP Doctors unsuccessfully try to resuscitate a girl hit by Russian shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine. February 27, 2022 2022
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education, research, criticism and review
Alexey FurmanAlexey Furman (Ukrainian, b. 1991) / Getty Images A young girl cries as a man bids his daughter goodbye at the railway station in Lviv, Ukraine, on March 22, 2022. Lviv has served as a stopover and shelter for the millions of Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion, either to the safety of nearby countries or the relative security of western Ukraine’ 2022
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education, research, criticism and review
Sergi Mykhalchuk (Ukrainian, b. 1972) Evacuation of civilians from Irpіn, Ukraine. March 4-5, 2022 2022
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education, research, criticism and review
Mstyslav Chernov (Ukrainian, b. 1985) / AP Mariana Vishegirskaya stands outside a maternity hospital that was damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 9, 2022. Vishegirskaya survived the shelling and later gave birth to a girl in another hospital in Mariupol 2022
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education, research, criticism and review
“I see art-making as a process of “unselfing” – you can be outside of your body, less focused on what’s inside, and see yourself in relation to the broader world.”
Hoda Afshar
“In co-opting the documentary genre, Afshar harnesses its truth-telling power while simultaneously telling another story – one that is often unspoken or at odds with what we are told by those in power.”
Through her poetically constructed images, Hoda Afshar illuminates a world overshadowed by history and atrocity. Yet we never see despair: we see defiance, comradeship, reinvention and a search for how photography can activate new ways of thinking. …
What unites her materially diverse work is a concern with visibility: who is denied it, what is made visible by media, and how photography can reveal, overlook and manipulate truth.
Much of her work addresses critical humanitarian issues of our time: war, statelessness, diaspora, oppression, corruption. She challenges stereotypes. We don’t see passive victims or closed narratives: we are introduced to new perspectives that might lead us to reappraise the world we inhabit.
The title of the exhibition was inspired by lines in a poem by Kaveh Akbar:
a curve is a straight line broken at all its points so much of being alive is breaking.
Through her photographs and moving image works, Iranian-born, Melbourne-based Hoda Afshar examines the politics of image-making. Deeply researched yet emotionally sensitive, her work can be seen as a form of activism as much as an artistic inquiry.
Afshar uses the camera to give visibility to those who have been denied it, resolutely insisting on the humanity of her subjects. She makes us contend with violence and brutality, not through blunt imagery but through evocation. Her work is anchored in empathy yet also radical in the way it wrestles with injustice.
This exhibition will feature photography and film from the past decade to present a comprehensive overview of Afshar’s recent practice, including a newly commissioned series. Amassed together in dialogue for the first time in a major public institution, these works offer a poignant reminder of the power of images and their coercive potential.
An accompanying publication offers critical insight into Afshar’s work as well as creative and experimental responses from a range of writers.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website
“The tragic events that have unfolded in Israel and Gaza over the past month should be enough to remind us that art is powerless in the face of real political upheaval. The most an artist can do to effect social and political change is to create a few striking images that circulate beyond the thought-absorbing walls of the art museum. Even then, any change to people’s attitudes is bound to be incremental and highly personal. …
Like Valamanesh, Afshar has never been able to let go of her brutalised, much-maligned country. In her ongoing series, In the exodus, I love you more (2014-), which takes its title from a line by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, she returns time and again to Iran, capturing diverse images that have the same mixture of ordinariness and oddity one finds in the work of a photographer such as William Eggleston. Landscapes, street scenes, portraits, horses, peacocks, a building draped in heavy curtains, a hose in a courtyard … nothing is disqualified from an idiosyncratic overview that digs under the skin of her birthplace. The same applies, but with added eeriness, to the series Speak to the wind (2015-22), set on the island of Hormuz, off the southern coast of Iran.”
“Through her poetically constructed images, Hoda Afshar illuminates a world overshadowed by history and atrocity. Yet we never see despair: we see defiance, comradeship, reinvention and a search for how photography can activate new ways of thinking. …
Even in her early, nominally “documentary” series, you can sense an embracing of the ambiguity of the still image, and an interest in composing a reality more vivid (and perhaps genuine) than dispassionate reportage might be capable of. …
What unites her materially diverse work is a concern with visibility: who is denied it, what is made visible by media, and how photography can reveal, overlook and manipulate truth.
Much of her work addresses critical humanitarian issues of our time: war, statelessness, diaspora, oppression, corruption. She challenges stereotypes. We don’t see passive victims or closed narratives: we are introduced to new perspectives that might lead us to reappraise the world we inhabit. …
Hoda Afshar’s work addresses conflict, injustice, mobility and the often fragile state of being alive. It reminds us that dominant powers can be challenged by exposing truth and envisioning something new.”
“Social and political commentary is a given in much of her work, but her lens remains sympathetic, never othering. This is highlighted in sections throughout Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line. Her portraits of stateless asylum seekers on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, taken in 2018, display power and dignity in visibility, despite lived experiences of harshness and torment.”
In the exodus, I love you more (2014-) is a portrait of her home country formed by experiences of familiarity and distance. The artist is both at home and searching, like an outsider. Images suggest at times an intimate proximity, and at others a separation akin to the one made by raising a camera to your eye.
Afshar examines her experience of migration and, she tells me, seeks to “dismantle the idea of there being one way of seeing Iran.”
The final image in this series shows the erasure of a woman’s face in a painted Persian miniature.
In September, the Art Gallery of New South Wales will present Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line, the first major solo exhibition of one of Australia’s most innovative and unflinching photo-media artists, Iranian-born, Melbourne-based Hoda Afshar.
Featuring photographs and moving image works from the past decade, including a newly commissioned series, the comprehensive exhibition provides an overview of the artist’s recent practice and examines the politics of art making. Amassed together in dialogue for the first time by a major public institution, these works offer a poignant reminder of the power of images and their coercive potential.
Art Gallery of NSW director Michael Brand said it is a great pleasure to present Afshar’s first major solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW.
‘Hoda Afshar is one of the most exciting artists working in Australia today. While her work explores themes of violence and pain, it also speaks to the transformative potential of image-making which is of profound importance to art institutions, as agents of advocacy and emotional encounter,’ said Brand.
‘Her work gives visibility to marginalised voices and serves as a powerful reminder of art’s capacity to embolden, inspire, and move. Her own voice as an artist is a defiantly international one.’
Since she first began working with photography in the early 2000s, Afshar has resolutely insisted on the humanity of her subjects. She is sensitive to the camera’s status as an imperialist tool that has long been used to define how history is told and how power is consolidated. Throughout her practice, she has involved her subjects in the act of photographing them in order to equalise the power dynamic that exists between photographer and photographed and return agency to those she depicts.
Exhibition curator, Art Gallery of NSW senior curator of contemporary Australian art Isobel Parker Philip said: ‘Hoda Afshar’s work is both deeply researched and poetically resonant and can be seen as a form of activism as much as an artistic inquiry.
‘Hoda’s approach is unique in that she makes us contend with brutality, not through blunt imagery but through evocation. Her work is anchored in compassion yet also radical in the way it wrestles with injustice.
‘Hoda’s photographs and videos are emotionally embroiled in the world they depict. It is this fact that makes a survey of her work both compelling and timely.’
Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line includes the reveal of a new body of work commissioned for the exhibition, titled In turn 2023, which is a series of large-scale photographs depicting Iranian women who, like Afshar, live in Australia and have watched, from afar, the women-led Iranian uprising that began in September 2022. Presented one year on from when the uprising started, the portrait series is something of an elegy, speaking to their shared grief and their shared hope.
Among the most recognisable works featured in the exhibition, is Behrouz Boochani – Manus Island 2018, which was acquired by the Art Gallery in 2020 from Afshar’s pivotal series Remain 2018, which comprises a video and suite of photographs. Made on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea with a group of stateless asylum seekers, the video and photographs of Remain serve as testimony to the lived impact of Australia’s border protection policy.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication, Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line (RRP$65) featuring new writing by curator Isobel Parker Philip and writers including Hala Alyan, Elyas Alavi, Behrouz Boochani, Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange (working as the duo Snack Syndicate), Taous Dahmani, Shahram Khosravi and Sarah Sentilles.
Press release from the Art Gallery of New South Wales
The series Behold was made while the artist was travelling in the Middle East and befriended a group of young gay men who invited her to photograph them in a local male-only bathhouse.
The title Behold is alluding to the role of the viewer, the camera, in partially constructing the meaning of these images. For instance, the visible expressions of male intimacy tend to be viewed through a very narrow sexualized frame in the West, but in Iran, like elsewhere in the East, it is quite normal to see men engaged in physical contact, embracing each other and kissing cheeks, physically massaging each other in bathhouses, without it being sexualized. It is like public displays of breastfeeding and images of naked infants or adolescents – and also male intimacy – it is always interesting for me the reactions that these things engender in the West – the weird sort of prohibitions, and paranoias that surround the displaying of certain bodies or their interactions.
Picking up on something that John Berger said for example – if we were to replace the men in these images with women then of course the reaction would be very different. So returning to the idea of viewing: this work for me (now, upon reflection) is also about challenging the viewer – or different viewers – about these things. because despite the points just mentioned, the dominant reading of the work will still likely be about the censorship of bodies and identities in a particularly religious environment. But again what I am suggesting is that this has something, though not everything, to do with our own framing.
Hoda Afshar Instagram page. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
In Behold (2016), once more we see acts of resolute defiance by people performing for the camera. Afshar was invited by a group of gay men to observe re-enacted gestures of protection and intimacy outlawed in most of the Middle East.
Unable to freely express their love in society, they disclose and affirm it for Afshar and her lens.
Behold was made unexpectedly, and without design. I was travelling in a city that I sometimes return to, and I got to know a group of gay men. There, where they live, these men (and many others like them) are mostly left to be. But only on the condition that they lead one part of their lives in secret. Rarely, that is, do their bodies ever meet in open honesty outside, in public. Only here, in this bathhouse, where their desire to be seen and embraced by others – just to be and to be held – is played out the partial openness of these four closed walls.
The bathhouse no longer exists. But while it still did, these men invited me to document it and a little glimpse of their lives in it. We arrived, but I was not allowed to enter. So we rented the place, and for a few hours I took pictures while these men played themselves performing their lives for my peering camera, in order that their desire to be seen might be realised, in part at least, here in the world of the images – in the act of beholding, where the bare thereness of life is transformed from mere appearing or appearance, into something more meaningful … into recognition.
Hoda Afshar. “11 Works by Hoda Afshar,” on the Cordite website 1 August 2018 [Online] Cited 09/11/2023. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Remain addresses Australia’s contentious border protection policy and the human rights of asylum seekers. The work was made in collaboration with several of the men who remained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, six or more years after they left their homelands to seek asylum in Australia, but instead were sent to languish in the remote offshore detention centre. The work involves these men retelling their individual and shared stories through staged images, words, and poetry, and bearing witness to life in the Manus camps: from the death of friends and dreams of freedom, to the strange air of beauty, boredom, and violence that surrounds them on the island.
Afshar believes ‘typical images of refugees only reinforce in the eyes of the viewer their inferior image and position’. Afshar, in collaboration with the people in her
portraits, attempted to create ‘an artwork – using the language of poetry, performance, and song – that defies such logic, and forces the viewer to confront their
own incomprehension, as well as the very inexplicableness of the situation that these men face.’ Collaboration, trust and empathy is an important aspect of Afshar’s art practice. She says:
One portrait shows a stateless Kurdish refugee called Emad struggling under a downpour of sand. When I asked him what natural element he wanted to use in his image, he chose soil. He said: ‘It reminds me of land; the land that I was torn from; the land that has been torn from me. From us. Soil is the most precious idea in Kurdish culture. But we are stateless. I’ve been stateless my whole life.’
Afshar’s criticism of documentary photography isn’t aimed at photographers themselves, or their intentions: ‘It’s important for all of us to look at the visual languages that we inherited, that are predominantly imperial visual languages, and ask questions about why we’re framing things in a certain way.’
Hoda Afshar’s 2018 body of work Remain is an unflinchingly political commentary on Australia’s border protection policy and serves as testimony to its assault of human rights. Encompassing a film and a suite of photographic portraits, Remain speaks the stories of a group of stateless men who remained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, after the immigration detention centre closed in October 2017. In the film, their experiences are recounted as episodic fragments shot through with violence in voice overs that are by turns lyrical and brutal. Some recite poetry, some sing, some remember the riots and the suicides. As their stories unfold, the camera pans over a picturesque landscape – lush foliage and crystal-clear water. A ‘green hell’ as one man describes it. It is the abrupt collision of these two registers, the haunting narrative and the idyllic imagery, that carries the emotional force of the work. It is beautiful and horrifying at the same time.
The accompanying photographic portraits of the same protagonists are insistent and powerful. They stand before us, in the foreground of the image, against a dark backdrop. In these photographs, there is nothing to distract us from the figures themselves. Nothing to detract from the simple fact of their presence. They each assert their right to be seen. The bluntness of this gesture is itself a political act. For that is what detention does; it makes individuals invisible. In these portraits, Afshar acknowledges the plight of these men metaphorically. They are beset by the elements, by fire, water and earth. But at no point is their humanity questioned.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website
Behrouz Boochani (Persian: بهروز بوچانی; born 23 July 1983) is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, human rights defender, writer and film producer living in New Zealand. He was held in the Australian-run Manus Island detention centre in Papua New Guinea from 2013 until its closure in 2017. He remained on the island before being moved to Port Moresby along with the other detainees around September 2019. On 14 November 2019 he arrived in Christchurch on a one-month visa, to speak at a special event organised by WORD Christchurch on 29 November, as well as other speaking events. In December 2019, his one month visa to New Zealand expired and he remained on an expired visa until being granted refugee status in July 2020, at which time he became a Senior Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Canterbury.
Boochani is the co-director, along with Iranian film maker Arash Kamali Sarvestani, of the documentary Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, has published numerous articles in leading media internationally about the plight of refugees held by the Australian government on Manus Island, and has won several awards.
His memoir, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Nonfiction in January 2019. The book was tapped out on a mobile phone in a series of single messages over time and translated from Persian into English by Omid Tofighian.
After the November 2022 publication of his second collection of writings, Freedom, Only Freedom: The Prison Writings of Behrouz Boochani, Boochani visited Australia for the first time to promote the book in December 2022.
Hoda Afshar’s 2018 body of work Remain is an unflinchingly political commentary on Australia’s border protection policy and serves as testimony to its assault of human rights. Encompassing a film and a suite of photographic portraits, Remain speaks the stories of a group of stateless men who remained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, after the immigration detention centre closed in October 2017. In the film, their experiences are recounted as episodic fragments shot through with violence in voice overs that are by turns lyrical and brutal. Some recite poetry, some sing, some remember the riots and the suicides. As their stories unfold, the camera pans over a picturesque landscape – lush foliage and crystal-clear water. A ‘green hell’ as one man describes it. It is the abrupt collision of these two registers, the haunting narrative and the idyllic imagery, that carries the emotional force of the work. It is beautiful and horrifying at the same time.
The accompanying photographic portraits of the same protagonists are insistent and powerful. They stand before us, in the foreground of the image, against a dark backdrop. In these photographs, there is nothing to distract us from the figures themselves. Nothing to detract from the simple fact of their presence. They each assert their right to be seen. The bluntness of this gesture is itself a political act. For that is what detention does; it makes individuals invisible. In these portraits, Afshar acknowledges the plight of these men metaphorically. They are beset by the elements, by fire, water and earth. But at no point is their humanity questioned.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website
On the islands in the Strait of Hormuz, a belief exists that a wind, known as zār, can possess a person, and can be exorcised from them through an intense ceremony of dance and music.
On the islands of the Strait of Hormuz, near the southern coast of Iran, there is a belief that the winds – generally believed to be harmful – can possess a person, causing them to experience illness or disease. As part of a ritual placating the winds’ harmful effects, the islands’ inhabitants practice a ceremony involving incense, music and movement, in which a hereditary cult leader speaks with the wind through the afflicted patient in order to negotiate its exit.
When artist Hoda Afshar first visited the islands in 2015, she found herself drawn not only to these distinctive customs practiced by its inhabitants but also to its otherworldly landscapes – the strange valleys and statue-like mountains, themselves sculpted by the wind over many millennia. While the exact origins remain unclear, the existence of similar beliefs in many African countries suggests that the cult may have been brought to the south of Iran from southeast Africa through the Arab slave trade. This seldom spoken history became a starting point into an intriguing project for Afshar, who sought to document the story of these winds and the traces they have left on these islands and inhabitants.
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With 110 cameras functioning instantaneously in a photo studio, Afshar created 3D images of her subjects and used a 3D printer to convert them into statues.
An officer and lawyer in the Australian Special Forces
While serving in Afghanistan, he raised concerns that the Australian government were covering up the corruption of Australia’s defence force for political gain, and sacrificing the lives of Australian soldiers. After his concerns were consistently ignored, he copied over a hundred secret documents and distributed them to several journalists and to the ABC. He faces trial on five charges relating to National Security. If found guilty, he will face lifetime imprisonment.
Portrait of Rod St George, who exposed atrocious conditions at the Manus Island detention centre
Agonistes (2020)
Hoda Afshar explores the experiences of people who have spoken out. The artist worked with people known as whistle-blowers, who have brought to light various transgressions perpetrated in Australian institutions today. Although whistleblowing in Australia is considered a hallmark of our democracy, whistle blowers take great personal risks when drawing attention to institutional wrongdoing.
Agonistes is based on the experiences of several men and women – former employees in the areas of immigration, youth detention, disability care, and other government agencies – who chose to speak out, and who now live with the consequences. They describe the personal and professional ruin, the breakdown of friendships and family relationships, and the physical and mental anguish that followed their decision to call out alleged abuses, and the reasons that led them to do so, despite knowing their possible fate. They explain that if they could go back, they would do it all again.
While their individual stories differ, the shared struggle of these men and women and their portraits expose the same agonizing truth: that the choice between responsibility and obligation – between morality and the law – is, in a very real sense, the essence of tragedy. Afshar produced a 3D scan of each of the whistle blowers. This was then 3D printed to create a bust. Afshar created studio photographs of the busts, which resulted in a suite of images that abstracts the identity of each subject. The eyes – a feature we usually use to identify people in photographs – become curiously blank.
“It took me 14 years to find that level of courage, or knowledge or connection to the place [Australia] to make a work like the Agonistes, to turn the lens inward, to feel like I’m authorised to talk about it as a citizen,” says Afshar.
To identify the whistleblowers to approach for the project, Afshar worked with Claire Loughnan, a lecturer in criminology at the University of Melbourne.
She flew each person to Melbourne and photographed them using a system of 110 cameras – which allowed her to essentially create a 360-degree portrait. She used this composite image to generate a 3D-printed sculpture of each whistleblower. …
Afshar was fascinated to discover that the one thing that the 110 cameras could not capture was the details of her subjects’ eyes – resulting in a glazed-over effect.
This accidental byproduct of the process had a certain poetic resonance for the photographer: it reminded her of the eyes on ancient Greek busts.
She points out that democracy and tragedy emerged in ancient Greece at the same time.
“Often in the tragic narratives, the main character is the one that is caught between two conflicting choices: responsibility and obligation, or morality and the law … [or] the public and the state.”
“The reality of Athens at the time was a system that was rooted in patriarchy, slavery, xenophobia, refugee crisis – which are still the struggles of our time. And the function of tragedy then was to give voice to the excluded voices.”
In the Agonistes video work, we hear the excluded voices of the whistleblowers while Afshar zooms in on her subjects’ eyes, mouths, hands.
In the adjoining room, the new series In turn (2023) is a suite of large, framed photographs of Iranian women based in Australia. Many images show them as they tenderly braid one another’s hair. These women are unidentifiable, apart from artist and activist Mahla Karimian, who appears airborne with a pair of flying doves.
This work was catalysed by the women-led protest movement sparked by the death of Mahsa Jina Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman arrested in September 2022 for not following Iran’s strict female dress codes. The uprising filled the streets with women chanting “Women, Life, Freedom!” and “Say her name!” in fearless defiance of authorities, who responded with murderous retaliation.
Afshar was observing her homeland from afar. She says she wanted to “share voices the media was ignoring”. She was inspired by social media images of women plaiting each other’s hair in public: a rebellious act that echoes a practice of female Kurdish fighters preparing for battle.
But the images aren’t violent. They’re quietly peaceful, showing solidarity in grief, hope and determination. In making this “visual letter” to her Iranian sisters, Afshar has risked long-term exile from her country of birth.
Curated by a team of photography specialists from the institution’s Department of Prints and Photography (see below)
Benjamin Brecknell Turner (English, 1815-1894) North Side of Quadrangle, Arundel Castle 1852-1854 Negative photograph on paper 29.7 x 39.6cm BnF, department of Prints and Photography, RES PHOTO EI-6-BOITE FOL B (n° 3) Gift of André and Marie-Thérèse Jammes, 1960
What a lovely exhibition to start the year 2024 on Art Blart.
My favourite photographs in the posting: three beautiful fashion photographs by Frères Séeberger; a stunning late Atget Parc de Sceaux, Duchess Alley (between 1925 and 1927, below) in which you can feel the crispness in the air of the early winter morning; and the glorious seascapes of Gustave Le Gray, probably the best (and most atmospheric) photographer of the sea in all time.
In this posting we observe how black and white photographs are never just black and white but full of different hues and colours. These colour variations tell us a lot about the perception of the image.
As the exhibition text notes: “The strength of the blacks and whites, the variations of hues influence our perception of the image: the more contrasted it is, the more readable it is for our eye saturated with absolute blacks and whites; the more nuanced it is, the more sensitive the distance of time becomes.”
As we enter a new year, another year further away from the origin of the light captured in these photographs, the sensitivity of early photographers and their ability to displace time continues to entrance the viewer.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Noir & Blanc: Une esthétique de la photographie
Black and white is inseparable from the history of photography: its developments, from the end of the 19th century to today, have revealed its plastic force. While the use of colour intensified from the 1970s, black and white reinvented itself as a means of assertive aesthetic expression emphasising graphics and material. Black and white photography remains less expensive and simpler, but its persistence to this day can be explained above all by the fact that it has come to embody the very essence of photography. It appears to carry a universal, timeless, even memorial dimension, where colour would be the sole translation of the contemporary world.
The National Library of France holds one of the richest photographic collections in the world with some six million prints, these are particularly representative of this abundant history of black and white photography.
Benjamin Brecknell Turner (English, 1815-1894) Arbre le long d’une clotûre (Tree along a fence) 1852-1854 Negative photograph on paper 23.5 x 27.3cm BnF, department of Prints and Photography, RES PHOTO EI-6-BOITE FOL B (n° 3) Gift of André and Marie-Thérèse Jammes, 1960
Photography on paper, with its speed and precision, revolutionised image production in the mid-19th century. The prerequisite is the production of a negative then of the same size as the print. The first negatives are on paper. Reversing the values of blacks and whites, they offer an unknown vision of the world. These oppositions, inverted or not, are the basis of the aesthetics of photography.
One of the earliest British amateur photographers, Benjamin Brecknell Turner (1815-1894) was experimenting with photography barely ten years after the invention of the medium. He exhibited widely during his lifetime and is best known for his beautiful photographs of 19th-century England, picturesque ruins and rural scenes.
A founder member of the Photographic Society of London, Turner contributed to the rapid technical and aesthetic development of photography in the 1850s. Our collection includes a unique album compiled by Turner, ‘Photographic Views from Nature’, containing some of the earliest photographs made in and around the counties of Worcestershire, Surrey, Sussex, Kent and Yorkshire, alongside the radical modern architecture of the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park.
Text from the V&A website
The origins of black and white
Before the invention of colour photography by the Lumière brothers in 1903, one might believe that all photography was black and white. The reality is more complex: the early days were more those of a varied range of values where pure blacks and whites were the exception and so-called sepia tones were the most common. The negative / positive process patented by the Englishman Fox Talbot in 1841 makes it possible to multiply the prints on paper and therefore to vary the shades.
Certain subjects play on oppositions: the mountain views of the Bisson brothers, the Great Wave by Gustave Le Gray, the portraits of the prolific amateur Blancard.
Désiré Charnay (French, 1828-1915) Chichen Itza: Bas-relief des Tigres, Palais du Cirque (Chichen Itza: Bas-relief of the Tigers, Circus Palace) 1859-1861 Print on gold-toned albumen paper from a collodion glass negative BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RES PHOTO VZ-940-FT4
In 1861, Charnay gave Napoleon III a copy of the album American Ruins composed for the Emperor of expensive proofs on albumen paper toned with gold, in an exceptional format, the miraculous result of his Mexican epic. The shift to gold accentuates the vigour of the contrasts and brings a cold tone to the blacks.
Désiré Charnay (French, 1828-1915) Uxmal: détail de la façade dite de la couleuvre (Uxmal: detail of the so-called snake facade) 1859-1861 From the album American Ruins Print on gold-toned albumen paper from a collodion glass negative 59 x 78.2cm BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RES PHOTO VZ-940-FT4
The forty-nine views of the ruins of Yucatan, Chiapas, Tabasco and the province of Oaxaca constitute the first set of photographs entered into the collections of the Geographical Society, in 1861. During the general assembly of November 29 , Charnay presents his collection of photographs exhibited in the meeting room. The same day, at the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, Jomard returns to the quality of Charnay’s photographs, which allow us to conclude that American art – the Egyptologist’s supreme tribute – “deserves a place alongside Assyrian art, and even alongside the art of the Egyptians.”
Bisson frères. Louis-Auguste (French, 1814-1876) and Auguste-Rosalie (French, 1826-1900) La crevasse (départ) sur le chemin du grand plateau, ascension du Mont-Blanc (The crevasse (departure) on the way to the grand plateau, ascent of Mont-Blanc) 1862 Print on albumen paper from a wet collodion glass negative BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-14 (3)-FOL
In 1861, the Bisson brothers managed to hoist their photographic equipment to the summit of Mont Blanc. Mountaineering feat, photographic feat: in these extreme conditions, the plate must be sensitised just before use and developed as soon as possible. The violence of the contrasts, when the brightness of the snow juxtaposes the black of the rocks, redoubles this technical challenge. This conquest of the limit is crowned by the harmony of the print, carried by a site with spectacular aesthetic qualities.
This exhibition brings together black and white masterpieces from the photographic collections of the National Library of France. Nadar, Man Ray, Ansel Adams, Willy Ronis, Helmut Newton, Diane Arbus, Mario Giacomelli, Robert Frank, William Klein, Daido Moriyama, Valérie Belin…: the big names in French and international photography are brought together in a journey which presents approximately 300 prints and embraces 150 years of history of black and white photography, from its origins in the 19th century to contemporary creation.
Black and white is inseparable from the history of photography: its developments, from the end of the 19th century to today, have revealed its plastic force. While the use of colour intensified from the 1970s, black and white reinvented itself as a means of assertive aesthetic expression emphasising graphics and material. Black and white photography remains less expensive and simpler, but its persistence to this day can be explained above all by the fact that it has come to embody the very essence of photography. It appears to carry a universal, timeless, even memorial dimension, where colour would be the sole translation of the contemporary world.
The exhibition in brief
The exhibition addresses the question of black and white from an aesthetic, formal and sensitive angle, emphasising the modes of image creation: plastic and graphic effects of contrasts, play of shadows and lights, rendering of materials in all the palette of values from black to white. The emphasis was placed on photographers who concentrated and systematised their artistic creation in black and white, experimented with its possibilities and limits or made it the very subject of their photography such as Man Ray, Ansel Adams, Ralph Gibson, Mario Giacomelli or Valérie Belin. Particular attention was paid to the quality of the prints, the variety of techniques and photographic papers, but also to the printing of black and white, books and magazines having long been the main relay to the public for photographic creation .
The exhibition thus shows the richness and extent of the BnF’s photographic collections. Among the richest in the world with some six million prints, these are particularly representative of this abundant history of black and white photography.
Exhibition co-organised with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais
Commissariat
Sylvie Aubenas, director of the Prints and Photography department, BnF Héloïse Conésa, head of the photography department, responsible for contemporary photography at the Department of Prints and Photography, BnF Flora Triebel, curator in charge of 19th century photography at the Department of Prints and Photography, BnF Dominique Versavel, curator in charge of modern photography at the Department of Prints and Photography, BnF
Text from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)
Hippolyte Blancard (French, 1843-1924) Mademoiselle L. Vulliemin, à mi-corps, la tête couverte d’un chapeau (Miss L. Vulliemin, half-length, head covered with a hat) 1889 Platinum print from a gelatin-silver bromide glass negative BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-508-PET FOL Gift of print dealer Maurice Rousseau, 1944
Amateur photographer, wealthy pharmacist enriched by the sale of digestive pills, Blancard creates a prolific and picturesque work in a superb contrast of black and white thanks to the use of platinum. This expensive process, patented in 1873, ensures stable prints with marked contrasts which do not stifle the rendering of halftones.
Émile Zola (French, 1840-1902) Denise et Jacques, les enfants d’Émile Zola (Denise and Jacques, the children of Émile Zola) 1898 or 1899 Gelatin aristotype, gelatin aristotype on matte velvety paper with toning, cyanotype, silver print, gelatin aristotype toned with gold, collodion aristotype with toning BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, NZ-214-8 Purchase at public sale, 2017
From 1894, the novelist devoted himself with passion to photography, in an intimate vein. Here he tests the effects of his shooting by varying the papers, the processes, the tones based on the same negative on a glass plate. We see that black and white is a monochromy among others (brown, orange, blue). Very few of these test prints created in the privacy of the photographer’s laboratory have reached us; the collection of these six prints is exceptional.
Frères Séeberger. Jules, Louis and Henri Séeberger (French, 1872-1932; 1874-1946; 1876-1956) Untitled 1909-1912 Silver print on baryta paper BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, OA-38 (1)-BOITE FOL Acquisition-donation from the family, 1976
Frères Séeberger. Jules, Louis and Henri Séeberger (French, 1872-1932; 1874-1946; 1876-1956) Untitled 1909-1912 Silver print on baryta paper BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, OA-38 (1)-BOITE FOL Acquisition-donation from the family, 1976
For almost half a century, the Séeberger brothers, specialising in fashion reporting, captured elegant women in their natural settings, racecourses, palaces, upscale beaches. The print on baryta paper, used here, marks a technical breakthrough. A layer of pure white barium sulfate is now interposed between the print support and the binder layer, where the image is formed. Manufactured industrially from the 1890s, chemically developed baryta papers and their characteristic cold tone would dominate silver production until the 1970s.
Frères Séeberger. Jules, Louis and Henri Séeberger (French, 1872-1932; 1874-1946; 1876-1956) Untitled 1909-1912 Silver print on baryta paper BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, OA-38 (1)-BOITE FOL Acquisition-donation from the family, 1976
In Black and White
Entirely designed from the Library’s rich collections, Black & White: An aesthetic of photography presents more than 300 works from the 19th century to the present day which bear witness to the use black and white from more than 200 photographers from around the world.
Considering black and white photographic creation from the 19th century to the most contemporary works, the exhibition presented at the François-Mitterrand affirms an ambition commensurate with the historical and geographical scope of the BnF’s collections and their immense variety technical and stylistic. The Department of Prints and photography has been a high place of conservation and emulation for monochrome photographic expression, under the impetus in particular of Jean-Claude Lemagny. Recently deceased, this very first curator of photography contemporary, in office from 1968 to 1996, was a fervent defender of black and white aesthetics.
In the 19th century, the powerlessness of photography to reproduce colours do not reduce it only to black and white and the tonal variations (blue, sepia, etc.) are in fact multiple. The exhibition opens with a spectacular monochrome of prints by Émile Zola, alongside luxurious prints by Gustave Le Gray, by Désiré Charnay and the Bisson brothers. It is at the turn of the 20th century that black and white became the tonality of photography par excellence, with the generalisation of the gelatin-silver bromide process.
An artistic and aesthetic approach
The rest of the journey deliberately interweaves creations of the 20th and 21st centuries, without chronological consideration. According to a primarily artistic and aesthetic approach to black and white, works of authors, decades, styles, schools and various origins interact, in order to highlight visual constants and graphics observable in use by black and white by photographers from 37 countries. That the photographers either suffered lack of colour or – from the 1950s-1970s – preferred to it, black and white is appreciated by artists for its numerous graphic, material and symbolic, which allow them to obtain certain effects features.
Write in black and white
These are these different ways of writing in black and white that the exhibition shows, starting with the contrasts: prints by Imogen Cunningham and André Kertész at the sculptural portraits of black women by Valérie Belin, in passing through the photograms of Man Ray, the books of William Klein or the fashion photographs of Helmut Newton, the contrast is deliberately sought by certain artists. By accentuating blacks and whites, or even making them disappear to any intermediate shade of grey, they bring out the essential lines of their subjects, retrace the design of the world,
gain visual and graphic expressiveness.
The play of shadows and light, at the origins of the photographic act, forms another part of the exhibition highlights. Bringing together the works of photographers as varied as Brassaï, Alexandre Rodtchenko, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Willy Ronis, Flor Garduño, Daido Moriyama, Arthur Tress or Ann Mandelbaum, this part emphasises the dazzling effects or shadows cast, explored by these artists in their portrait practice, of the street snapshot, of the nocturnal shooting or in their laboratory experiments.
The exhibition continues with a chart of tests deployed in ribbon, from the blackest to the whitest. These prints signed Jun Shiraoka, Emmanuel Sougez, Edward Weston, Barbara Crane or Israel Ariño recall the ability of black and white to render effects of matter by its infinite variations of grey or, conversely, suggest the overflow or disappearance of all matter.
A sensory experience
The journey ends with a paradox with the works of photographers who, like Patrick Tosani, Marina Gadonneix or Laurent Cammal, disturbing the visitor’s perception by using colour processes to represent a black and white subject – an ultimate game with codes inherited from their art. Designed to show the historical depth and the richness of the BnF collections, this exhibition is intended to be educational and sensitive: emphasising certain technical aspects linked to printing practices, while insisting also on the irreducible material part of this art. By the high quality of prints presented, the exhibition offers to the public a sensory experience that will make them perceive the nuances hidden behind this apparently monolithic notion black and white.
Flora Triebel and Dominique Versavel. “En Noir et Blanc,” in Une saison en photographie, Chroniques No. 98, BnF, September – December 2023
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Parc de Sceaux, Duchess Alley Between 1925 and 1927 Print on matte albumen paper from gelatin-bromide glass negative BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-109 (16)-BOITE FOL B
Eugène Atget claimed a humble, artisanal practice of photography. He used the same old camera and printing paper for decades. Only the disappearance of his usual supplies forced him to change. There is therefore no aesthetic research, yet these colour variations tell us a lot about the perception of the image.
The photographer artist can choose the colours of his prints by playing on the chemistry of the fixing baths or on the nature of the papers.
Gold toning, known since the 1850s, produces deep blacks but is very expensive. Baryta or platinum papers appeared at the end of the century and made it possible to further accentuate contrasts.
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Plage de Sainte-Adresse avec les bains Dumont (Sainte-Adresse beach with Dumont baths) 1856 Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative 31.3 x 41.3cm Former Alfred Armand collection BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)
The strength of the blacks and whites, the variations of hues influence our perception of the image: the more contrasted it is, the more readable it is for our eye saturated with absolute blacks and whites; the more nuanced it is, the more sensitive the distance of time becomes.
Provenance
This article was designed as part of the exhibition “Black & White – An aesthetic of photography” presented at the BnF from October 17, 2023 to January 21, 2024.
The marines of Le Gray
Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) is a central figure in 19th century photography. A contemporary of photographers like Nadar, Charles Nègre and Henri Le Secq, he began his career by training as a painter. With great mastery of photographic technique, he developed two major inventions, the collodion glass negative in 1850 and the dry wax paper negative in 1851.
Le Gray’s seascapes mark not only a milestone in the history of photography, but also its true intrusion into a pictorial genre characteristic of the English school. Fixing the movement of the waves while the snapshot is still stammering, combining two negatives, one for the sky and one for the sea, Le Gray plays like a virtuoso with a complex technique in the service of a lyrical vision, which prefigures marine studies by Courbet in the 1860s-1870s. The success was immense in France and England: these “enchanted paintings” were acquired by crowned heads, aristocrats, artists and art collectors.
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Vapeur (Steam) 1856-1857 Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative 31.3 x 37.2cm BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, ESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Groupe de navires – Sète – Méditerranée – No. 10 (Group of ships – Sète – Mediterranean – No. 10) 1857 Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative 29.9 x 41.2cm Former Alfred Armand collection BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) La Vague brisée. Mer Méditerranée No. 15 (The Broken Wave. Mediterranean Sea No. 15) 1857 Photograph, albumen paper, collodion glass negative 41.7 x 32.5cm BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) La Grande vague – Sète – N° 17 (The Great Wave) 1857 Photograph, albumen paper, collodion glass negative 35.7 x 41.9 cm BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Flotte franco-anglaise en rade de Cherbourg (Franco-English fleet in Cherbourg harbour) August 4-8, 1858 Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative 31 x 39.8cm Former Alfred Armand collection BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)
Félix Nadar (French, 1820-1910) La Princesse Marie Cantacuzène (The Princesse Marie Cantacuzène) around 1855-1860 Varnished salted paper print from a collodion glass negative 20.8 × 15.3cm BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-15 (2)-PET FOL
Nadar created two portraits of this classically beautiful young woman. It indicates on the back of one of the proofs that it is the Romanian princess, Marie Cantacuzène.
The portrait by Félix Nadar
Until the beginning of the 1880s, Félix Nadar’s portraits were distinguished by their neutral backgrounds.
The merit of Mr. Nadar’s portraits does not consist only in the skill of the pose, which is entirely artistic, there is a learned and reasoned arrangement of the light, which attenuates or increases the daylight depending on the character of the head. and the operator’s instinct. We also find in the printing of the proofs a delicate search for harmony and slightly faded tones which soften the edges of the contours with their darkness.
Félix Nadar (French, 1820-1910) Bakounine About 1862 Silver print from the original negative on collodion glass 27.1 × 20.6cm BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-15 (4)-FOL
The revolutionary, philosopher and theoretician of socialism Mikhail Bakunin is one of the immense personalities that Nadar photographed during his career and offered to clients in his constantly enriched portrait gallery. We see here a print from 1862, contemporary with the shooting, but there is also a print made twenty years later and finally a print around 1900, brought up to date after heavy retouching. Thus until the end of the activity of the Nadar workshop, the oldest portraits of celebrities were always offered to customers.
Félix Nadar (French, 1820-1910) Jean Journet (1799-1861) 1857 Salted paper print from collodion glass negative 27.4 x 21.8cm BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-15 (9)-PET FOL
Jean Journet, nicknamed the Apostle, was a picturesque and eccentric Parisian figure, often ridiculed by his contemporaries. Former carbonaro, pharmacist in Limoux, he discovered the philosophy of Fourier and decided to spread his doctrine by abandoning his family and taking his pilgrim’s staff. His humanitarian evangelism, advocating fraternity and association, led him to write numerous pamphlets which he distributed in an untimely manner: by throwing them from “paradise” into theatres or by laying siege to famous writers and editorial offices. Interned several times in Bicêtre, Journet found upon his death a defender in Nadar who published an article in Le Figaro on October 27, 1861, concluding: “Ah my dear fools! that I love you much better than all these wise men.”
Nadar draws inspiration from Spanish painting from the Golden Age to render “this dazzling head of Saint Peter”.
Félix Nadar (French, 1820-1910) Charles Asselineau (1820-1874) Between 1854 and 1870 Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative 23.8 x 18.1cm BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-15 (1)-PET FOL
Charles Asselineau is one of Nadar’s oldest friends. They became friends at the Collège Bourbon and were both close friends of Baudelaire. A fine scholar and supernumerary librarian at Mazarine, Charles Asselineau, author of, among other things, Paradis des gens de lettres and L’Enfer du Bibliophile, was close to the publisher Poulet-Malassis, nicknamed by Baudelaire “Coco-mal-perché”. He collaborated with Nadar on two short stories published in April and August 1846: “The Healed Dead” and “The Found Paradise”, reprinted in When I Was a Student. He belonged to the small circle of editors who documented the Pantheon-Nadar to which biographies of each character were originally to be annexed.
He was Nadar’s best man at his wedding… warned, however, two weeks after the ceremony. The groom explained this in a letter: “It’s quite funny that my first witness learned of my marriage 15 days after the consummation and through an announcement letter. This, my good friend, will be explained to you by me on our first trip. I will limit myself to telling you for the present that I went to your house the day before, a Sunday and that on Monday morning at noon time fixed for the ceremony I did not know at 11 o’clock if I was getting married.” (NAF 25007, fol. 8).
Alexandre Rodtchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) Jeune fille au Leica (Young girl with Leica) 1934 BnF, prints and photography
Piergiorgio Branzi (Italian, 1928-2022) Bar sur la plage, Adriatique (Beach bar, Adriatic) 1957 BnF, prints and photography
Willy Ronis (French, 1910-2009) Venise (Venice) 1959 BnF, prints and photography
A student of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design in Chicago, Metzker sublimates the formal particularities of this school through exceptional mastery black and white: he excels at stylising reality by constructing his images in direct opposition to dark and light flat areas.
Mario Giacomelli (Italian, 1925-2000) Je n’ai pas de main qui me caresse le visage (I have no Hands caress my face) 1961-1963 BnF, prints and photography
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Portrait d’acteur (Actor portrait) 1968 From the series Japanese theatre BnF, prints and photography
André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 1er janvier 1972 à la Martinique (January 1, 1972 in Martinique) 1972 BnF, prints and photography
Bernard Plossu (French, b. 1945) Paris 1973 BnF, prints and photography
Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015) Immigrants, Istanbul, Turkey c. 1977 BnF, prints and photography
Koichi Kurita (Japanese, b. 1962) Melting Snow on a Rock, Nagano, Japan 1988 BnF, prints and photography
Flor Garduño (Mexican, b. 1957) Canasta de Luz (Corbeille de lumière)(Basket of Light) 1989 BnF, prints and photography
Laurence Leblanc (French, b. 1967) Chéa, Cambodge (Chéa, Cambodia) 2000 From the series Rithy Chéa Kim Sour and the others BnF, prints and photography
Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand Quai François Mauriac, 75706 Paris Cedex 13 Phone: +33(0)1 53 79 59 59
![Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) 'New York [Wall Street]' Negative 1915; print 1916 Photogravure](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/strand-wall-street-a.jpg "Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) 'New York [Wall Street]' Negative 1915; print 1916 Photogravure")
![Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) 'New York [Wall Street]' Negative 1915; print 1916 Photogravure](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/strand-wall-street-b.jpg "Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) 'New York [Wall Street]' Negative 1915; print 1916 Photogravure")
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